Phyllis Wong and the Waking of the Wizard

by Geoffrey McSkimming

Wallace Wong stopped centre-stage and looked up. He squinted against the bright lights shining down from the fly tower, and held his hands up before his face, his thumbs and forefingers forming a square shape. He moved a step to the right. Then he shifted his hands to the left, waited a few seconds, and nodded. He lowered his hands and checked the stage beneath him.

  A trap door, Phyllis observed. I wonder which trick he’s set that up for?

  Another man came out from the wings at that moment. He approached Wallace Wong and shook his hand. The two men spoke quietly.

  ‘See? I be,’ whispered Myrddin.

  ‘There you are,’ said Phyllis. ‘Or, there Hercule S. Perkus is! Where’s Jaunty Jasper?’

  ‘In my dressing room. This is the first night of my engagement here at the Froux-Froux Levité. That is my first meeting with your great-grandfather, Phyllis.’

  Phyllis tingled. This glimpse of History was something she’d never forget.

  Wallace Wong and Hercule Perkus had a quiet chuckle about something; then Wallace clapped him lightly on the shoulder and they went off in opposite directions, Hercule Perkus disappearing into the left wings and Wallace making for the right, where the chorus girls were warming up. Here he paused and drew one of them aside from the group.

  ‘I bet I know who that is,’ Phyllis said, watching Wallace chatting to a tall, blonde woman who had an enormous set of maracas.

  ‘Maracas Estevan,’ said Myrddin.

  Clement curled the ends of his handlebar moustache and watched her intently as she chatted with Wallace.

  ‘W.W. told me about her,’ said Phyllis. ‘She was very popular, it seems.’

  ‘She was,’ agreed Myrddin. ‘She is, she was, she will be forever so in the clime of Time . . .’

  ‘I bet she’s good with those,’ said Clement, commenting on her percussion. He felt himself a bit of an expert on such instruments; many top-notch xylophonists were sometimes accompanied by maracas.

  ‘You are not whistling Dixie when you say that, Master Whiskers.’

  Maracas Estevan threw back her head and laughed at something Wallace had just said, her shiny blonde curls shaking. Wallace touched her lightly on the elbow. She shook her instruments playfully at him.

  Phyllis felt a bit squirmacious at all this.

  Just then, a short man with an unlit stub of cigar clenched between his teeth and a clipboard under one arm rushed onto the stage. ‘Ladies ernd gentlemen!’ he roared in a harsh voice (a stub of a voice, Phyllis thought, just like his cigar). ‘Kindly clear ze stage, s’il vous plaît! Ze patrons are entering ze ’ouse. Zis is yer quarter-hour call!’

  Wallace and Maracas laughed again, then they and the other chorus girls hurried offstage. Stagehands scurried across the stage, one man sweeping it quickly, others making last-minute adjustments to the big shell-shaped footlights at the front, on the other side of the curtains.

  ‘Now,’ said Myrddin, as all the theatre workers began to disperse, ‘let us take our places in the wings. Very soon you shall see my Jasper in full flight.’

  He led Phyllis, Daisy and Clement to the wings at stage left and they waited in front of a heavy black velvet drop.

  ‘Hey, I just thought of something,’ said Clement, looking perturbed.

  ‘What, Master Whiskers?’ asked Phyllis.

  Clem pushed his glasses further up his nose. ‘Well, what happens if someone—someone from the here-and-now—walks into us? Will they feel us? Or will they go right through us, just like we were ghosts? Um . . . like we are ghosts?’ He shivered—to think that he himself might be a ghost was starting to make his head spin.

  ‘Do not be concerned,’ Myrddin told them. ‘There is a force I have set in place. No one will come close to us—the players will be averted from our presence by intuition.’

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ said Clement. ‘I don’t want people messing with my metabolism. It’d be like being zombified.’

  Phyllis could hear, on the other side of the towering crimson curtains, the audience taking their seats. The sound was like a swell of waves from the ocean, getting louder and louder as more and more people entered the auditorium.

  Soon the house was filled, and the orchestra, on the other side of the closed curtains, had taken its place. There were several minutes of tuning-up—little snatches of melody interspersed with what sounded like cats getting ready to fight, as the violins were adjusted—and then Phyllis heard the conductor tapping his baton loudly on his music stand.

  The audience’s murmurings fell away to a vast silence, and the overture commenced, brightly and jauntily.

  ‘Here we go,’ whispered Clement, and Phyllis flashed him a grin.

  The house lights slowly dimmed and then, with a mighty whooooosh, the curtains separated, hurtling off to each side of the stage. The lights brightened and out came thirty-six chorus girls from the opposite wings, their arms draped around each other’s shoulders, their legs kicking high, as they spread out in a perfect can-can dance that filled the stage.

  Daisy barked excitedly, and Phyllis didn’t have to shush her.

  For the next hour, Phyllis, Daisy, Clement and Myrddin watched the acts pouring forth onto the stage. There came a man who could sing while juggling three bowls of goldfish; a group of women who played zippy tunes on the marimbas (the marimba being similar to the xylophone, Clement gave a running commentary to Phyllis on how well the marimba-ists were playing, but how one of the women kept klutzing up her hammer technique, until Phyllis told him to pipe down); the Whistling Ottersoff Brothers—identical twins who whistled in perfect, almost deafening, harmony, their climax being the William Tell Overture; and a reappearance of the chorus girls, this time doing a slow, underwater type of dance (they were all decked out as spangled seaweed, looking for King Neptune, but they never found him).

  Then came Lorraine and Her Huffacious Hounds, a dog act where twelve small dogs ran all over the place, jumping through hoops, climbing tall towers and leaping into tubs of water, forming doggy pyramids and doing other activities which no self-respecting dog would ever think of performing. (Daisy watched them all with a strange expression—Phyllis got the feeling that Daisy was pitying her fellow canines.)

  After all these astonishing acts, the curtains whoooooshed closed and the Master of Ceremonies stepped in front of them.

  ‘Ladies ernd gentlemen,’ he boomed, ‘tonight we ’ave a very special treat for you. For ze first time ern any stage in Pari, we are proud to present ze merst amazing artist ever to throw ’is verce!’

  A bold ripple of enthusiasm could be heard from the house. Phyllis looked up at Myrddin, and she noticed that sad twinkle in his eyes again.

  The Master of Ceremonies continued, in his quick, strange accent: ‘We are indeed very privileged to ’ave secured our guest performer for ze cerming mernth’s season. You will be amazed, nay, dare I say ASTERNDED by what you will see! And, I am confident in my prediction when I tell you zat you will NEVER see ze likes erf his kind AGAIN!’

  The enthusiasm was now growing louder, becoming a rolling surge of excitement.

  In the opposite wings, Phyllis saw Hercule S. Perkus emerge. He was holding Jaunty Jasper delicately in the crook of his arm, and watching as a stagehand positioned his chair centre-stage. The stagehand looked over to Perkus; Perkus nodded, and the stagehand scurried offstage.

  Myrddin watched his earlier incarnation, his attention mainly fixed on Jaunty Jasper. Phyllis detected a look on Myrddin’s face—almost a pang of longing, she thought.

  A movement in the opposite wings drew Phyllis’s attention back over there: from the shadows, seeping silently forward, came the tall, wide-shouldered Alexander Sturdy. Phyllis couldn’t help shuddering when she saw him coming to skulk behind Perkus. Sturdy was staring, his eyes narrow and dagger-sharp, at the back of Perkus’s head.

  The next moment, Wallace Wong appeared next to Perkus. He gave Perkus a soft slap on the shoulder, and Perkus smiled at him. (Wallace wouldn’t be performing on stage unti
l the end of the second act, at the conclusion of the evening, as he was the headlining act.)

  ‘And now,’ finished the Master of Ceremonies, loudly and lustily, ‘at GREAT EXPENSE to ze management erf ze Froux-Froux Levité Opera ’ouse, we proudly present, fer yer entertainment puh-leasure, a man you will never forget: ’ERCULE S. PERKUS and ’is friend, JAUNTY JASPER!’

  Discovering things

  A mighty wave of applause flooded towards the stage, and Phyllis smiled: there had been something about the way the M.C. had announced Perkus’s name that tickled her funnybone.

  ‘Hercule S. Perkus?’ Phyllis said to Myrddin. Then she repeated it, imitating the M.C.’s hurried way of speaking and his staccato accent. ‘Herc S. Perkus?’

  Clement heard her. ‘Hocus pocus?’ he said, pushing his glasses up his nose.

  ‘My little secret jest,’ Myrddin smiled.

  Phyllis grinned.

  ‘But now, watch!’ the wizard told them. ‘My time in the limelight has arrived!’

  From the opposite wings, Hercule S. Perkus strode onto the stage with Jaunty Jasper nestled on his arm.

  Perkus began the act by introducing himself and Jaunty Jasper. ‘Ah, Jasper,’ he said, ‘you look troubled. What perturbs your wooden noggin?’

  The dummy’s bulging eyes rolled around. ‘Aaaah,’ he sighed, in a high falsetto. ‘The world is falling apart!’

  ‘Falling apart?’ asked Perkus.

  ‘Yes! All manner of disasters!’

  ‘Such as?’

  The orchestra started playing, brightly, zippily, and Jaunty Jasper sang:

  The lady fell in the upholstery machine,

  You should have been there—what a scene!

  You should have heard her wail and scream!

  But now she’s fully recovered.’

  Two more verses followed, each telling of a similar nasty disaster, but always the woman ended up fully recovered.

  Hercule S. Perkus shushed Jasper then, and for the next few minutes he asked the dummy lots of questions, and Jasper fired back outrageous replies. The audience was howling with laughter by the end of it all.

  During all of this, Phyllis watched carefully—both the performance and the people in the wings opposite. She saw W.W. laughing heartily, his eyes twinkling with delight. Maracas Estevan stood close by his elbow, giggling at Jasper’s quips.

  Further back, in the dimness surrounding the Whistling Ottersoff Brothers, Phyllis saw Sturdy. He was scowling deeply, as though his face were granite and the scowl had been chiselled there. His eyes blazed with a fierceness that, even from that distance, seemed to spear across the stage, right at Perkus and Jasper.

  Phyllis felt unnerved at Sturdy’s presence. She found it hard to take her eyes from his face, and she started feeling something else: she started feeling sorry for the man. It seemed to her unfair that the management of the Froux-Froux Levité Opera House had hired a second ventriloquist for the same program.

  Maybe this is what started pushing him over the edge, she pondered. Maybe his fury drove him wild . . .

  Phyllis went back to watching her great-grandfather watching Hercule Perkus and Jaunty Jasper. She couldn’t wait to tell W.W., when next she saw him and when next he could see her, that his path and the path of Myrddin had already crossed.

  Then, on stage, Perkus seemed to have had enough of Jasper’s relentless cheekiness. ‘You, Jasper, are incorrigible!’ he declared theatrically. ‘I have had quite enough of your company for one evening!’

  He plonked Jasper on the chair, centre-stage. Then, with a low bow to the audience, and to much applause, the ventriloquist exited, going to stand next to Wallace Wong and Maracas Estevan in the wings.

  Five seconds passed. Nothing happened on the stage. Five more seconds came and went—a long time in the theatre when there is no action. Sounds of restlessness came from the auditorium: people coughing, speaking quietly, shifting in their seats.

  Myrddin was watching Jasper and Perkus at the same time. The wizard was as still as stone.

  Then, Phyllis heard a collective gasp. Her gaze shot across to Jasper, and her spine tingled.

  Just as W.W. had described the scene to her when they’d been in Venice, Jasper slowly turned his head and looked off into the wings where Perkus stood. Then the dummy turned his head to the auditorium. ‘Well,’ he announced loudly, his eyebrows moving up and down, ‘now the show really starts!’

  ‘Wow!’ whispered Clement. Daisy, watching from the top of Phyllis’s bag, had her full attention on the dummy.

  Jaunty Jasper made a few quips and then slid down off the stool, completely unaided, and strode to the front of the stage. At the footlights, he stopped, staring out into the audience.

  Phyllis could sense the electrically charged atmosphere. She edged forward and peered through a chink in the curtains nearby. The audience looked like a photograph; no one was stirring, and it seemed that no one was even breathing.

  Jasper placed his hands on the floor and stood on his head, before executing six swift, perfectly performed cartwheels across the breadth of the stage!

  Just as W.W. had described it, the sounds of disbelief and wonder and utter amazement came from the house like the ocean was rolling in, in one HUGE gasp of incredulity.

  Phyllis saw Alexander Sturdy, still skulking in the opposite wings by the Whistling Ottersoff Brothers. Sturdy’s face was like a storm cloud ready to thunder.

  Jaunty Jasper finished his cartwheels and stood centre-stage, to rapturous, near-deafening applause and cheers.

  ‘He must be remote-controlled,’ said Clement, nodding to himself.

  ‘No,’ said Phyllis. ‘W.W. said he wasn’t . . . isn’t. Somehow he’s—’

  She stopped. Hercule S. Perkus came back on stage as Jasper seemed about to tell some more jokes. The ventriloquist clicked his fingers, and suddenly Jasper collapsed onto the boards, all the life in him instantly quenched.

  Perkus picked him up, bowed modestly and left the stage, exiting through the wings and the congratulations of his co-performers (except Sturdy, who, Phyllis observed, was no longer there).

  The applause was unlike anything Phyllis Wong had ever heard.

  Myrddin was watching the empty stage as the curtains slid closed with their loud but muffled whoooooooosh. His eyes were wistful; excited yet sad.

  The Master of Ceremonies reappeared before the curtain. ‘Ladies and gentlemern, zere will be a short interval now, and zen we shall plernge into Act Two, climaxing zis evening’s entertainment wiz ze world’s merst illustrious illusionist, ze great Wallace Wong, Cernjuror erf Wernder!’

  ‘Hey,’ said Clement, ‘we get to see Wallace Wong perform?’

  ‘Do you wish to?’ asked Myrddin.

  Phyllis didn’t need to answer that—a great tremor of excitement went through her.

  ‘Yeah!’ Clement exclaimed.

  ‘There will be a few other acts before him,’ Myrddin said. ‘Chorus girls again, and that Sturdy creature will have his spot. Your great-grandfather, Phyllis, will finish the evening, as a great headliner always does.’

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Clem. He’d picked up a small sheet of paper from a table nearby.

  Myrddin inspected it quickly. ‘Ah. A handbill, for tonight’s show. The theatre prints them daily and they’re handed out to passers-by on the afternoons of performances. To fill up any seats that have not been sold, I understand.’

  Phyllis took one of the handbills. She read the announcements it displayed:

  TONIGHT!

  SAMEDI OCTOBRE 24, 1931

  AT THE WORLD FAMOUS

  FROUX-FROUX LEVITÉ OPERA HOUSE!

  AN EVENING OF BRILLIANT VARIETY!

  Featuring Dancers, Jugglers, Singers, Canine Contortionists, the Whistling Ottersoff Bros. and, for the first time on the Parisian Stage,

  HERCULE S. PERKUS

  VENTRILOQUIST EXTRAORDINAIRE, AND HIS FRIEND JAUNTY JASPER.

  The evening will be crowned with the world’s
greatest magician

  WALLACE WONG, CONJUROR OF WONDER!

  DOORS OPEN 7.30 P.M. GOOD SEATS STILL AVAILABLE!

  She noticed straightaway that there was no mention of Alexander Sturdy and Narky Norman. No wonder Sturdy was getting resentful, she thought. She folded the handbill and slid it into one of the pockets in her shoulder bag, near Daisy.

  Then Phyllis had an idea. While the stage was being reset and all the hubbub of preparations for Act Two were underway, it would be a perfect opportunity to try to find out more about Alexander Sturdy. And perhaps discover what he took from Myrddin.

  She gave Daisy a quick pat on the head, and gently pushed her further down into the bag. Then Phyllis retreated, slowly so that Clement and Myrddin, busy watching the preparations on stage, weren’t aware she was going. Like a wafting of silk, she left their periphery, sliding into the half-light at the edges of the wings.

  She made her way around the rear of the stage, going behind the thick black curtains that hung there. Having been in theatres before, she had a good idea of her way around backstage places.

  She reached the opposite wings, and quickly found what she was looking for: a spiral staircase that led to below the stage. Phyllis started down the stairs.

  It was peculiar descending those stairs. Halfway down, a gaggle of heavily feathered chorus girls started coming up and, for the briefest of moments, Phyllis thought they’d bump into her. But then something happened: just as the chorus girls were about to collide into Phyllis, all the girls, as one, seemed to realise they’d forgotten something. In perfect synchronisation, they all turned and trooped down the stairs again.

  Phyllis grinned, and continued her descent. When she got to the ground floor, she stepped aside and all the girls marched up again, as if they remembered that they hadn’t forgotten anything, and they needed to get up onto the stage in a hurry.

  Phyllis felt cocooned by this; it seemed like a sort of protection that Myrddin had spread over her.

  There was a corridor straight ahead. Off this corridor was a long row of dressing rooms, some of which had gold stars stuck on their doors. Phyllis ventured up the corridor.