“Maybe I can just avoid him. He’ll be busy with the lights throughout the show, and if he fouls up The Disappearing World, I’ll murder him. There’s no second show today, so afterward it will be hours of congratulation, if it goes well, or commiseration, if it fails, but in any case lots of people and food and drink, and he can’t exactly propose in front of everyone, can he?”
“Wouldn’t that be romantic?” Fee said. “A declaration of his love before all the world?”
“No,” Phil said adamantly, “it would not.” Because the only thing worse than breaking Hector’s heart in private would be breaking it in public.
No, she amended. The worst thing would be to accept him out of embarrassment and obligation and kindness. For she liked Hector so very much, she did not quite know how to tell him that she didn’t love him.
Their part didn’t come until the end, the finale that would have to be particularly grand to overshadow the masterful illusions of their parents and older brother Geoff. Fee appeared onstage early in the act, to be cut in half vertically with an unbearable sound of sawing through her skull, then scurried back to their dressing room to pour herself into her sequined oil-slick costume.
They watched from the wings as Geoff hammered a spectator’s Patek Philippe watch to bits, then resurrected it, polished, better than new. Dad levitated a woman from the audience, while Mum sashayed and gesticulated and flourished. She was really quite a good magician herself after twenty years as an Albion, but she preferred the less demanding role of stage beauty. She was still striking even in natural light, but just old enough that she enjoyed the heavy makeup and feathers and stage lights that worked a glamour to defy her years.
Then the lights went out, and Dad’s voice, forced down an octave, said in a cavernous boom, “Now, for the first time ever, experience the wonder of the cosmos, the primal forces of the universe, as two of the most powerful magicians in England make not just a person, not just a building, but everything disappear.”
The lights flashed on blindingly, then dimmed so the two girls in their shining obsidian sheaths were disembodied heads and hands. The audience thought that was a pretty good trick in itself and was always willing to cheer attractive girls. But these girls did not shimmy or undulate or even smile (which had been the hardest thing for Fee in rehearsal). They stared over the audience with kohl-shadowed eyes and spoke in perfect unison in voices of doom, an oracular chorus.
“Imagine...everything you know, everything you love, vanishing in the space of an instant.”
They paused, letting the fear begin to build. And it did, even in those people who went to the Hall of Delusion only to scoff and try to spy the mirrors and false bottoms.
Cold air began to flow gently through floor vents, making legs shiver.
The lights grew imperceptibly darker.
“Imagine, the person next to you suddenly gone, the husband, the stranger. Imagine the walls of this theater flying apart into their separate molecules. Imagine this planet as it was at the dawn of time, every atom alone and apart in the void of space.”
Phil and Fee had argued about this for a while, wondering if science would throw the audience off, but Geoff told them it wasn’t proper science anyway and would work, so long as everyone knew that an atom is pretty small and not a thing you’d like your loved ones to be reduced to.
A low percussive heartbeat began to thrum, just within the range of hearing.
“If you were gone too, it wouldn’t matter. You wouldn’t know the world had ended. But today you will be alone, utterly alone, the only living thing left in the vast emptiness of space. Ladies and gentlemen, experience...The Disappearing World!”
It almost would have worked without any special effects. The buildup, the public’s perpetual fear of invasion and destruction, combined with a sudden darkness, would have made half the audience scream.
But Phil and Fee had devised a way to do it in full—more than full—light. A blaze erupted from the darkness. Strobes and mirrors at just the right intervals and levels blinded and dazzled and confused so that, for the space of five seconds, though the room was preternaturally bright, no one could see the person in the seat next to him, the very walls of the theater, his hand before his face. The recorded heartbeat crescendoed and was echoed by a terrible high-pitched whine and then a thunder crash that shook the building. Every light went out, and even the people who had come alone grabbed the nearest hand.
Phil and Fee stood together in the blackness, their shoulders just touching.
“What happened?” Fee whispered. “That boom—it wasn’t in the rehearsal. Is Hector improvising?”
One coherent thought emerged from Phil’s confusion: Maybe that was what Hector was nervous about, and I don’t have to deal with a proposal tonight after all.
Even when the lights failed to come up thirty long seconds later, and the audience wondered if the trick was still going on, Phil could only feel relief.
Then someone began to open doors to the lobby, fire escapes, delivery bays, letting the evening haze float in. Only it was brighter than it should have been, flickering, and came with a choking chalky dust. There was a faint sound like angry buzzing bees, and then . . .
Phil hardly believed those volcanic sounds could be bombs. Nothing made by man could be so powerful. There was another explosion quite close by, then one slightly farther off, and though they retreated in a steady rhythm, the ground continued to shake. She heard a voice from outside cry, “There are hundreds of them!” People started to call for help, from a human, from a god, but they were cut off by a blast that was sound and touch and light and heat, all at once. Another wave of bombs began to fall, right outside the Hall of Delusion.
Phil and Fee could see the ghostly shapes of their audience rushing outside, tripping over one another, showing their best and worst as they pushed grandmothers out of their way or stayed to help people they’d never met.
The sisters had been trained from infancy to let nothing distract them while onstage. They could handle heckling and inappropriate laughter, broken props, torn costumes, and fires that refused to be swallowed. Now, because they were performers and the show must always go on, they stood stupidly on the stage while outside the world disintegrated.
Hector barreled out of the dusty half-light and dragged them underground. Mum and Dad rushed down the aisles, shouting over the confusion that their cellar was a shelter, but only a few people heard them. They were running for the nearest tube station or, more likely, just running.
The city had prepared for bombardment for slightly more than a year, since the day war was declared. The munitions plants and airfields had received steady strikes, and several cities had been hit, but though she carried her gas mask everywhere and nagged her neighbors, with the power of her WVS badge, to install their Anderson shelters in their petunia beds, she never really thought the Germans would bomb civilians in London. One small contingent had dropped a few bombs on the city a month before, but even the most adamant Hun haters admitted that was probably a mistake made by green or disobedient pilots on the way to bomb a port. There was an immediate retaliatory attack on Berlin, and then all had been quiet, aside from the expected attacks on military targets.
Phil staggered down to the cellar, past the mirrored boxes and human-size aquariums, past the chests and presses full of costumes going back generations. Her parents had gathered up a handful of people, mostly those too slow to join the others in their mad career into the inferno, or too world-weary to much care if this was their last day on earth. There was a little boy separated from his mother, and a middle-aged man with his empty sleeve pinned up, sitting on the floor, rocking, remembering the Great War that had taken his arm and half his generation.
Coming slowly out of her shock, Phil looked around the lantern-lit room for those most important to her. Miss Merriall, the wardrobe mistress, was calmly heating water over Sterno for tea. Dad was pacing rather dramatically in his purple star-spangled cape, and Mum wa
s wheeling all of the standing mirrors into an alcove where they wouldn’t cause deadly shards if they shattered. Hector quivered in a tension of fury like a setter at point, spots of pink on his pale cheeks, looking as if he desperately wanted to punch someone but didn’t know who, or how. Geoff was passing around spare gas masks . . .
“Where’s Stan?” Phil shouted. The shriek and boom of the bombs was muffled now. Even the end of the world couldn’t last forever.
“He was outside during the performance,” Fee said, her eyes widening. “You know how he hates watching the shows.”
Almost before Fee had finished, Phil was dashing past her family and up the stairs. Fee was right: though Stan enjoyed quiet training, he could never stand to watch the magic onstage before an audience. No one knew quite why, but when the show started, he would either wait outside the theater, letting his crystal ball run like a pet over his body, or more likely, take a walk down to the nearby Thames.
Phil opened the stage door and entered the disappearing world.
The Luftwaffe didn’t bother using flashing strobes where a blazing holocaust of incendiary bombs would do. They created terror not with chill breezes and subtle sound effects but with craters and corpses, screaming and explosions. And they removed the world Phil knew not with trickery and illusion but with the brute force of physics, leveling building after building, reducing the world inexorably to atoms.
She could hear bombs falling somewhere far away, but for the moment there were no planes overhead. The theater had been spared, but the dress store three buildings away had suffered a direct hit and was utterly gone. The café beside it was rubble, and the bookstore next door was still standing but with one wall blown off and the roof crumbling. Down the road was a deep pit with a charred bus dangling on its lip, and the entire row of buildings across the street was on fire. Farther away she could see masonry skeletons of buildings that had been gutted by the concussive force.
“Stan!” she screamed, but everyone was screaming for someone.
Geoff came up behind her. “Phil, don’t be a fool. There might be more bombers on the way.”
“Stan was out here. He always walked by the candy store.” It too was engulfed, exuding a sickening burnt-sugar smell. “It’s gone. He’s gone!”
She staggered into the chaos, to tear through rubble looking for Stan, to weep helpless tears and curse the Germans when a second wave of bombers came in after nightfall, following the trail of fire across London they’d blazed earlier.
All around London, millions of citizens were rallying. Their fear fled quickly, replaced by anger and then at last by something far more useful: grim, stubborn determination, a rocklike resolution to endure.
Soon Phil’s family joined her on their devastated street, and the Albions began to account for the fallen and treat the survivors. Fee found Phil a few hours later with rills of tear tracks running down her sooty face, sitting on a curb, exhausted with work and weeping.
“I can’t find Stan anywhere,” she said as Fee collapsed beside her. She sniffed, then sneezed from the mortar dust hanging in the air. “He’s gone, Fee. Our little brother is gone.”
Chapter 2
When they dragged themselves, wild-eyed and shell-shocked, in for breakfast at noon, Dad and Mum told the girls they were being sent to the countryside, someplace nice and safe.
“Not bloody likely!” Phil replied. “I’m not running away.”
She had a barrage of further objections ready, but before she could lob a single volley, her parents revealed their own astounding news.
“We meant to tell you last night anyway,” Dad said. “Hush, that’s only part of it. It’s been in the works for ages and was going to be our big surprise after your show.” He bowed his head. He’d been so proud that the Albions had been chosen for such a great—if dangerous—honor, but there could be no celebration now that little Stan was gone. Still, it made what he had planned all the more imperative. “We’re joining the army,” he said.
“What, the Home Guard?” Phil asked. Popularly known as Dad’s Army, it was mostly made up of men too old to go to the front. They trained as best they could with limited support and hardly any weaponry against the day Germans would land on English soil.
“Pah! I mean the real army, a special division—but hush!” He looked around with staged drama. “It is top secret! Winnie—Mr. Churchill, that is—was most insistent that no one outside of the squad know of its existence. But of course I except fellow Albions, and Albions by association.” He nodded to Hector. “We are accustomed to keeping secrets.”
Phil was so used to her father overacting that she didn’t take him very seriously, until he said, “We are joining the Magic Squad.”
He leaned precariously on the back two legs of his chair, arms folded, and waited.
“You mean, to entertain the troops?” Phil asked dubiously.
“We mean nothing of the sort,” said much more practical Mum. “It is a unit comprised of illusionists and stage technicians and painters and engineers whose job will be to deceive the Germans.”
“And the Italians, and the Japs, and whoever else dares to threaten dear old England,” Geoff said, jumping to his feet. “Any one of us can make a building disappear with a few tricks of light. Just think bigger. Imagine making a whole railroad disappear when the bombers come in! Or creating a false battalion of tanks to divert the panzers! Or those tricks we do with liquid nitrogen—we could make an entire town believe it was under a gas attack. Just think what trickery and illusions could do to help win this war!”
Until that moment, Phil had been able to see nothing beyond mangled bodies, spilled blood by inferno’s light, collapsed apartments where families were trapped, crushed, maybe still alive, for a while. Most of all, she saw a small empty space where Stan was supposed to be. And against all that, her own paltry efforts, the pull of her small muscles, the insignificance of her comfort. Now, suddenly, she saw how she could use her own unique skills to make a difference. How clever of the army to see how the Albions could be put to use. Above all else, Phil needed to be useful. She could see it now—how to turn a destroyer into a fleet of innocent fishing ships, how to hide an entire canal. If she could create illusions onstage, she could do them in the theater of war!
“When do we start?” she asked eagerly.
“You start for a farmhouse in Sussex by the next train,” Dad said. “We head for parts unknown shortly thereafter.” Oh, how he wished he had implemented the plan just one day sooner!
What followed was an epic battle that Phil fought valiantly, though she knew she was defeated from the outset.
She’d been allowed almost absolute freedom in her seventeen years; she didn’t see why now all of a sudden her parents got protective. If she could stay out until midnight while a Shakespearean roué friend of the family introduced her to Tom Collins, why couldn’t she parachute into France and dazzle the Germans with her illusions?
Her parents returned a flat no.
“The Auxiliary Territorial Services then,” Phil insisted. If she couldn’t join her parents and brother, at least she could join the armed forces in some capacity. She simply had to do something useful in this war.
“You’re too young.”
“I’ll stay in London and keep volunteering. Or I’ll work in a munitions factory. Anything! It isn’t fair that you three get to save England while Fee and I get shipped to some comfy country retreat.”
“Oh, I daresay it won’t be all that comfy,” Mum said.
Phil’s eyes lit up. “Oh Mum, do you mean the Land Army! It won’t be fighting Germans, quite, but if I could be a Land Girl, then at least I’ll free up some fellow to go and fight them for me.” She didn’t know a thing about plows or cows but had seen the posters featuring staunch, hardy girls in clingy khaki jodhpurs and even clingier forest-green sweaters.
“You can’t be a Land Girl at seventeen, Phil,” Ma said gently. “You’re still a child. You have to be kept safe.”
“But—”
“You’re my child,” Mum said. “I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.”
“What about you, Mum?” Fee asked. “What are we going to do if anything happens to you?”
“Nothing will happen to any of us,” she said with that facility for lying that all parents learn once their children develop the power of speech. “But our country is in danger, and we must go where we are most needed.”
“Precisely, which is why I should be allowed—”
“Enough!” Dad said brusquely. “Miss Merriall was kind enough to arrange for lodging for the four of you...I mean three . . .” There was a terrible moment of silence, then Dad found the strength to go on. “It’s at her sister’s farm, a place called Weasel Rue.”
He unfolded a worn map and searched Sussex. “The town’s called Bittersweet. Apples and hops, farm country. Where is the ruddy thing?” His finger wandered over the map, to no avail. “Well, it’s not on the map, but Miss Merriall assures us it’s there. You’ll be expected to work a bit, no doubt, but it is a well-to-do establishment, and you’ll be safe there.”
Safety was exactly what Phil did not want. She wanted privation and hardship, to feel like she was giving something of herself for England.
“If it’s all the same to you,” she sniffed, “I’m going to pretend to be a Land Girl.”
She was brought out of her own sulky egoism by Hector’s ragged voice. “I’m joining up, too.”
Dad sighed. “I understand how you feel, Hector, but you’re simply too young.”
“I’ve been considering it for a long time, ever since I turned eighteen. Last night cinched it.”
Phil looked at Hector in amazement. Until that moment she’d always thought of him as a boy, although he was a year her senior. Now, miraculously, he was a man, full-fledged, and she did not know whether to be proud of him or tell him he was a young fool.
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