Carter Beats the Devil

by Glen David Gold

  The music was fiery, and brash, with cymbals clashing and the lead violinist showing off Paganini-like hemi-demi-semiquavers. Carter was handed his rod and reel so he could materialize fish from just over his audience’s heads, and at the same time down from the flies came the instruments the Devil used for Night on Bald Mountain.

  “Go!” said the script girl, and Scott and Willie went onstage, where they were drilled through to great applause and astonishment, and then it was time for them to be loaded into the cannons, and they raced to backstage to change for their next bits. The partitioned dressing room was so small only one of them at a time could go in; since Scott had to get back onstage first, he changed first. He came out in black, and said to Willie, “Well, do I look like the Devil’s thug?”

  Willie nodded. He pulled the curtains carefully shut. He faced a rack of hanging costumes, most of them black, all in a row, all packed so closely together that getting one out was a struggle. He reached out for his executioner’s cloak and mask, and it seemed to resist him. He checked for snags, then pulled it out easily, utterly unprepared for the blackjack that came hurling out with it.

  . . .

  Onstage, things were building toward the new climax. First was Gone!, wherein Carter put Cleo into a chair, which began to rise, and when he fired a pistol, she disappeared. The Devil put a finger up in the air, indicating he had but one trick left, and he nodded smugly, confident it was so good Carter could in no way approach his presentation. Carter chuckled, as Albert was so expressive in pantomime that he seemed to make the fixed mask of the Devil smile, glare, glower, simply by his posture.

  “So,” Carter said, part of the script now, “one last trick, and I have to beat it?”

  A nod.

  “Or else . . .”

  A more significant nod, which caused nervous laughter.

  “Very well.”

  The Devil removed a silk handkerchief from his pocket. He turned it front and back to show it was an ordinary white handkerchief. Carefully, he extended his index finger and draped the handkerchief over it, and looked at Carter.

  Carter shrugged. “So far, I believe I can beat you flat.”

  The Devil’s finger described circles in the air, greater and greater circles, the handkerchief spinning at the tip, and as it spun, amazingly, it began to grow. It took several seconds for the audience to realize what was happening, but when they did, there was a great, mass intake of breath. He spun and spun the handkerchief until it was the size of a napkin, then a towel, then a bedsheet, and finally Carter had to stand back, as the silk expanded to the size of a small tent, which fell down over the Devil himself and continued spinning. The edges dragged on the stage, but slowly, slowly now, the material began to rise, and rise, and rise—revealing a street carousel. The silk had become a ribbed tent over the carousel, which had four seats, two of them in the shape of zebras, and two in the shape of bears, and in each seat there rode a beautiful woman in a sequined dress. The women held glasses of champagne and laughed, ran their hands through their bobbed hair, and pouted their lips in a display of vampish chorine sex appeal.

  The carousel ground to a halt. The girls got off and joined the Devil, standing two on each side of him, all of them linking arms. The carousel was wheeled away, and the stage from the front of the apron to its deepest recesses was pitch black and empty, save for the troupe of players.

  The Devil gestured magnanimously with his palm. He’d done his trick. Now it was Carter’s turn.

  “So all I have to do is something more extravagant than producing a carousel with two zebras, two bears, and four beautiful girls serving champagne?”

  The Devil rocked on his heels, rubbing his hands together.

  Carter snapped his fingers. It wasn’t a dramatic sort of snap, and it wasn’t even accompanied by fanfare or flashes of light. Nonetheless, one quarter of a second later, there was an elephant onstage.

  The effect was so startling, there were cries from several members of the orchestra and even the players were stunned. It certainly hadn’t looked that good in rehearsal. One moment, the stage was empty, the next, an elephant!

  In the back of the house, Ledocq stood, arms tightly around his waist, and holding his breath. When the crowd burst into cheers, he exhaled.

  People whistled, they stomped their feet, they laughed out loud. Many an elephant had vanished onstage—but appearing like that? Carter asked the audience, “How many people preferred the carousel business?” and the applause continued unabated, and he asked, “How many liked my friend Tug the elephant?” and the crowd whistled mightily, doubling and redoubling their applause.

  The showgirls left the Devil, and all draped themselves on the elephant.

  Carter said to the Devil, “Thank you. The elephant wins. Good night,” and he escorted the women and Tug offstage.

  Left alone, the Devil began to fume, and the orchestra struck up a passage from Don Juan in Hell to accompany him.

  . . .

  Carter ran ahead into the wings. As Tug passed Phoebe, she reached out and stroked his flank.

  She said, “You can keep your chorus girls, I’m holding hands with Tug tonight.”

  Drinking down a glass of water, he said, “You know, it’s a disaster tonight, I’m simply going into debt to my eyeballs for the rest of my life, but . . . this is fun. I’m having a terrific time. I’ve found a rhythm to work in, it’s terrific. I have to go back on in a moment, then we’re wrapped. Have I mentioned I’m having fun? Lord, I’m talking a lot. Say something to me.”

  She smiled. “I like you.”

  “I love you,” he said. It just came out, like a dove slipping out of his sleeve. He couldn’t take it back, and so he breathed slowly, willing the silence to mean something sweet. When seconds had passed, he added, “Did you hear—”

  “Yes.” She rubbed her hands like he’d shut a window on her fingers.

  “There’s all kinds of things you can say back. . . ‘Go soak your head.’ I can help you think of others.”

  “I don’t want to tell you that, but . . . we’ll talk later.”

  “Of course.”

  There was but one effect left, a final illusion about which all of San Francisco would be talking in the coming days. There would be much explanation by those who had seen it to those who hadn’t. And then those people, years later, would claim to have been there, too. No wonder so few witnesses could agree on what exactly had transpired, a situation that drove the police to use gross expletives in their private reports.

  In response to the materialization of the elephant, the Devil threw a tantrum. He commenced juggling three small human skulls that burst into flames and while the orchestra played the “Mephisto Waltz,” the lights came down, and with the skulls describing a higher and higher arc, the Devil made rude gestures that caused sparks and jets of flame to leap from his fingertips.

  Amazingly, as the Devil juggled, the flaming skulls went high enough to arc behind the proscenium arch, and, before anyone much noticed how this had happened, he was juggling two, then one, and then his hands were empty. James, with a snifter of brandy, stood on the catwalk by the prop man whose job was to catch the skulls in a long fishnet and drop them into a tub of wet sand.

  With the audience occupied by this display of pyrotechnics, Cleo and Esperanza ran back and forth with sparkling flares, and, behind the act curtain, the stage crew rolled a tremendous rig to the center of the stage. It stood a story tall. It consisted of a wooden staircase leading to a scaffold caped with black velvet.

  Carter took his position in the wings. He took deep, cleansing breaths. The makeup stinging his eyes, he looked up to the catwalk, and saluted James. He even hissed “James,” hoping for a simple wave back, but James wasn’t looking in his direction. He was, instead, enjoying the Devil’s final outburst, in which he opened a deck of Carter’s souvenir cards and burned them to a crisp, and then, in a ham-ish performance that made the audience roar with laughter, mimed sawing a piano in half and
threw his hands in the air as if to ask what the big idea was!

  Carter walked out and joined him at center stage. The Devil grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him until, by sheer sorcery, a pair of shiny handcuffs bound his wrists behind his back. Then the Devil pumped his fist in the air. He pointed into the shadows that had grown deep behind him: here was the mighty rig that took up so much of the stage, the staircase that led up to a cloaked object. On the Devil’s command, the cloak fell away to show off the guillotine.

  Beside the guillotine was a man dressed in a black robe. He wore a black hood into which eyeholes had been cut, and he stood with his hands on his hips and legs spread wide.

  Ledocq, who paced where the standing-room-only patrons would have stood, frowned at this reveal. Next time, they should bring the white spots up first, and then add red when the audience’s eyes adjusted. The executioner should have a white rope as a sash. Moreover, Willie was only illuminated from the chest down. He seemed to have missed his mark—either that, or he’d grown six inches.

  There were three men on the stage: Carter and the Devil by the apron, and, standing up by the guillotine, the executioner.

  “Well, an original guillotine built by Tobias Schmidt,” Carter said ruefully. “If I have to go, I should go first class.” He held for the nervous laughter. He looked at the Devil. “Might I go up there and have a look around before—”

  The Devil folded his arms and shook his head.

  “Someone should examine that to make sure it’s safe,” Carter declared. He took a step toward the footlights. “Will the smartest man in the audience please come onstage?”

  It was an ancient line, and no one tonight recognized it. But he’d thought it appropriate to bring back. The spotlights swept the audience until they all joined at once near the center of row G. Sitting there, squinting, and then pointing at himself as if to ask “You don’t mean me?” was Philo Farnsworth.

  “Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a special guest. Mr. Philo Farnsworth. A newlywed from Beaver City, Utah.” Mrs. Ledocq urged Philo out of his seat—he made more than a passing show of resistance—and prodded him to go up the aisle. “Mr. Farnsworth,” Carter continued, “is an engineer and an inventor, and it’s a privilege to have him in my audience.”

  When Philo was onstage, Carter directed him to walk up the staircase to the scaffold on which the guillotine stood. “As you can see, Ladies and Gentlemen, there is nine feet of space between the scaffold and the stage. This means no place to hide, no hidden compartments, no way out, in short.

  “Mr. Farnsworth,” he called, “what say you?” Philo stood by the executioner who, with a flourish, invited him to examine his device. Philo adjusted his eyeglasses, and knocked on the crossbeam and the posts, and respectfully tapped his finger against the blade itself.

  “It seems real,” he said.

  “I paid $750 for it,” Carter said, “it had better be real. Please come back down here. I don’t want to get blood on you.”

  More nervous laughter from the crowd. Philo took the stairs briskly, returning to the stage.

  “Philo,” Carter said, “I want you to be my eyes down here.”

  “Okay, Mr. Carter.”

  “If anything should happen to go wrong, you’re the next generation, you get to carry on my wizardry.”

  Color blotching his cheeks, Philo seemed unsure of where to look—Carter, the guillotine, or the audience, which was growing restless and anxious. The Devil beckoned with his fingertips, and two loutish brutes entered, dragging behind them the brank.

  Carter regarded the Devil coldly. “As for you, sir, my magic is greater than yours by far. You may try to cut off my head, but that will only annoy me. I’ll come back to haunt you!” His eyebrows flexed. He could see Phoebe standing in the wings. It was hard to gauge her expression. He wished he could wink at her to reassure her. How strange to fall in love with a woman who would never see him. She hadn’t said “I love you” and part of him felt loneliness, his lifelong companion, and the other part fully understood why she was so wary of love, and then the Devil’s henchmen went to work. One threw a rough sack over Carter’s head—there were no holes, not even for his eyes, not even for him to breath—and atop that, they fitted the brank.

  The audience murmured; there was a great shifting around and uncomfortable whispering. Carter, blinded and bound, was led to the edge of the stage by the two thugs, one on each elbow, and his struggles against them seemed real and forceful enough. They walked him in a circuit around the stage, and then, plainly visible from every seat in the house, they marched him up the stairs. The orchestra, which had been playing ascending staccato notes for long minutes, broke into Mozart’s Requiem. Ledocq, from the back of the theatre, continued to stare at the executioner. What was wrong with this picture?

  Struggling, step by step, the thugs guided their captive to the scaffold. They leaned him over the trestle and opened wide the fitted form of the lunette into which the brank just fit. Then down went the lunette, touching the back of his neck, and it was clasped shut with an impressive sliding bolt.

  The thugs trotted away. Now the only upright forms atop the scaffolding were the executioner and the guillotine itself, its victim strapped in with no way to escape. The orchestra held on to the same eight measures, repeating them with increasing volume. The executioner looked down at the cuffed hands that flexed, the narrow back, the trapped head, and he listened to the music. It was the largest audience he had played in years, and easily his most enjoyable role. He was a natural.

  “After being severed from the spinal cord,” he whispered, “the brain will still function for several seconds. Or so I understand.”

  A jolt, brank smacking against the guillotine frame. “Who is that?”

  The bald man said quietly, “Mysterioso.”

  A drumroll, the rest of the orchestra stopped dead, and here was a moment of terrible magic history. Philo, onstage, wondered how on earth Carter would get out of this. James gazed down from the catwalk, next to Tom, who was reading a newspaper. James was suddenly struck with a vision of the brank and a pillory. Something vague and unpleasant began to bother him, like he was the one himself being trapped. In the wings, Phoebe was counting the seconds until the show would be over, for she suddenly felt like a dolt and hoped to trade with Carter those soft words that she had not yet said. Max Friz had grabbed Mrs. Ledocq’s hand and was squeezing it. Olive White, who had been waiting for Mr. Griffin until this moment, had completely forgotten about all else except what was transpiring before her eyes. And throughout the audience, the dignitaries, the friends of Carter, the neighbors, and critics fixated on the guillotine. Even the men from RCA and the War Department ceased for just a few moments to be involved in the game of business and were leaning forward in their seats. James squinted to see past the lights, to look into the audience, and he no longer felt trapped—he took an emotional reading of the theatre, the hot and the cold anticipation, and he felt an ancient, almost forgotten pride, being shoulder-to-shoulder in a grand enterprise, even if for the last time. The whole house was engaged in the moment—save Ledocq.

  Ledocq was watching critically until he saw the executioner speaking. He wasn’t supposed to do that. The timing was so crucial he’d threatened to fire Willie if he were even five seconds behind schedule. And then, with the drumroll, he saw something so horrible he felt bile rising in his throat—Willie pulling the safety pin out of the guillotine.

  He cried “No!” aloud, clapping his hands—the audience around him, several people called “No!” as well, all caught in the thrill of it—and Ledocq managed to take several steps toward the stage before the executioner’s gloved hand reached out and made a leisurely pull on the release cord.

  There was a cold metallic sound like ice skates skidding, and then a heavy tumble into the wicker basket.

  The audience gasped, for it seemed very realistic. Ledocq was in the aisle, but now there was a crowd, standing, for him to push through. As
he moved forward, he also strained to see onstage. Willie—but he knew it wasn’t Willie—had fished into the basket, and now grabbed the brank by its crown and held it aloft, some dark form lolling inside like a sleeping bird.

  “Behold!” the executioner cried, which was part of the script, a fact that Ledocq clung to. It was not Willie’s voice, he knew this with all his heart. He pushed people aside. The audience fell silent enough to hear that the kettledrums were building again. The executioner spoke slowly. Surrounding the stage, black bunting was beginning to fall away, revealing polished glass surfaces. “Carter!” the executioner cried. Then, “the Great!” A weird blue glow began all over the house, its source uncertain. “Is!” and then “Dead!”

  Draperies and coverings around the arch fluttered to the ground like discarded feathers, revealing two dozen oddly shaped globes that wrapped around the stage as if they were massive lightbulbs on a marquee. They crackled with opalescent blue fire. The executioner, trophy extended toward the audience, was plunged into darkness, which seemed to startle him.

  Philo, who had felt small, stood alone on the apron of the stage. His head turned from globe to globe, and he felt his skin moving on its own accord, for he suddenly understood what was happening.