The Prestige

by Christopher Priest

  ‘Are you going with them?’ Rosalie said.

  ‘No! You go! You look and tell me what they’re doing!’

  ‘I’m going up to the nursery,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t leave me!’ I cried. ‘I don’t want to be here on my own. Don’t go!’

  ‘You can come with me.’

  ‘No. What are they going to do to Nicky?’

  But Rosalie was extricating herself from me, slapping her hand roughly against my shoulder and pushing me away from her. Her face had gone white, and her eyes were half-closed. She was shaking.

  ‘You can do what you like!’ she said, and although I tried to grab hold of her again she eluded me and ran out of the room. She went along the dreaded corridor, past the open doorway, then turned on the stone flags at the bottom of the staircase and rushed upstairs. At the time I thought she was being contemptuous of my fear, but from an adult perspective I suspect she had frightened herself more than me.

  Whatever the reason I found myself truly alone, but because Rosalie had forced it on me the next decision was easier. A sense of calm swept over me, paralysing my imagination. It was only another form of fear, but it enabled me to move. I knew I could not stay alone where I was, and I knew I did not have the strength to follow Rosalie up those distant stairs. There remained only one place to go. I crossed the short distance to the open brown door and looked down the steps.

  There were two light-bulbs in the ceiling illuminating the way down, but at the bottom, where there was another doorway leading to the side, much brighter light was spilling across the steps. The staircase looked bare and ordinary, surprisingly clean, with no hint of any danger, supernatural or otherwise. I could hear voices rising up from below.

  I went down the steps quietly, not wishing to be noticed, but when I reached the bottom and looked into the main cellar I realised there was no need to hide myself. The adults were busy with what they were doing.

  I was old enough to understand much of what was happening, but not to be able to recall now what the adults were saying. When I first reached the bottom of the steps my father and Clive Borden were arguing again, this time with Borden doing most of the talking. My mother stood to one side, as did the servant, Stimpson. Nicky was still being held to his father’s chest.

  The cellar was of a size, extent and cleanliness that came as a complete surprise to me. I had no idea that our part of the house had so much space beneath it. From my childish perspective the cellar seemed to have a high ceiling, stretching away on all sides to the white-painted walls, and that these walls were at the limits of my vision. (Although most adults can move around in the cellar without lowering their heads the ceiling is not nearly as high as in the main rooms upstairs, and of course the extent of the cellar is no greater than the area of the house itself.)

  Much of the cellar was filled with stuff brought down from the main house for storage: a lot of the furniture moved out during the war was still there, draped with white dust-sheets. Along the length of one wall was a stack of framed canvases, their painted sides facing in so that they could not be seen. An area close to the steps, partitioned off by a brick wall, was made over as a wine cellar. On the far side of the main cellar, difficult to see from where I was standing, was another large stack of crates and chests, tidily arranged.

  The overall impression of the cellar was spacious, cool, clean. It was a place that was in use but it was also kept tidy. However, none of this really impressed itself on me at the time. Everything that I’ve described so far is modified memory, based on what I know.

  On the day, what grabbed my attention from the moment I reached the bottom of the steps was the apparatus built in the centre of the cellar.

  My first thought was that it was a kind of shallow cage, because it was a circle of eight sturdy wooden slats. Next I realised that it had been built in a pit in the floor. To enter it one had to step down, so that it was in fact larger than it looked at first. My father, who had stepped into the centre of the circle, was only visible from about his waist up. There was also an arrangement of wiring overhead, and something whose shape I could not clearly make out rotating on a central axis, glittering and flashing in the cellar lights. My father was working hard; there was obviously some kind of control arrangement below my line of sight, and he was bending over, pumping his arm at something.

  My mother stood back, watching intently, with Stimpson at her side. These two were silent.

  Clive Borden stood close to one of the wooden bars, watching my father as he worked. His son Nicky was upright in his arms, and had turned around to look down too. Borden was saying something, and my father, while continuing to pump, answered loudly, and with a gesticulating arm. I knew my father was in a dangerous mood, the sort Rosalie and I suffered when we had enraged him to the point where he felt he had to prove something to us, no matter how ridiculous.

  I realised Borden was provoking him into this kind of rage, perhaps deliberately.

  I stepped forward, not to any of the adults, but towards Nicky. This small boy was caught up in something he could not possibly understand, and my instinct was to rush across to him, take hold of his hand and perhaps lead him away from the dangerous adult game.

  I had walked half the distance to the group, entirely unnoticed by any of them, when my father shouted, ‘Stand back, everyone!’

  My mother and Stimpson, who presumably knew what was going to happen, immediately moved back a few paces. My mother said something in what was for her a loud voice, but her words were drowned by a rising din from the device. It hummed and fizzed, restlessly, dangerously. Clive Borden had not moved, and stood only a foot or two away from the edge of the pit. Still no one looked at me.

  A series of loud bangs suddenly burst forth from the top of the device, and with each one appeared a long, snaking tendril of white electrical discharge. As each shot out it prowled like the reaching tentacle of some terrible deep-sea creature, groping for its prey. The noise was tremendous: every flash, every waving feeler of naked energy, was accompanied by a screeching, hissing sound, loud enough to hurt my ears. My father looked up towards Borden, and I could see a familiar expression of triumph on his face.

  ‘Now you know!’ he yelled at him.

  ‘Turn it off, Victor!’ my mother cried.

  ‘But Mr Borden has insisted! Well, here it is, Mr Borden! Does this satisfy your insistence?’

  Borden was still standing as if transfixed, just a short distance from the snaking electrical discharge. He was holding his little boy in his arms. I could see the expression on Nicky’s face, and I knew he was as scared as I was.

  ‘This proves nothing!’ Borden shouted.

  My father’s response was to close a large metal handle attached to one of the pillars inside the contraption. The zigzagging beams of energy immediately doubled in size, and snaked with more agility than ever around the wooden bars of the cage. The noise was deafening.

  ‘Get in, Borden,’ my father shouted. ‘Get in and see for yourself!’

  To my amazement my father then climbed out of the pit, stepping up to the main floor of the cellar between two of the wooden bars. Instantly, a number of the electrical rays flashed across to him, hissing horribly about his body. For a moment he was surrounded by them, consumed by fire. He seemed to fuse with the electricity, illuminated from within, a figure of gruesome menace. Then he took another step and he was out of it.

  ‘Not scared, are you, Borden?’ he shouted harshly.

  I was close enough to see that the hair on my father’s head was standing up from his scalp, and the hairs that stuck out from his sleeves were on end. His clothes hung oddly on his body, as if ballooning away from him, and his skin seemed to my mortified eyes to be glowing permanently blue as a result of his few seconds bathed in the electricity.

  ‘Damn you, damn you!’ cried Borden.

  He turned on my father, and thrust the horror-struck child at him. Nicky tried to hang on to his father, but Borden forced him away. M
y father accepted the boy reluctantly, taking him in an awkward hold. Nicky was yelling with terror, and struggling to be released.

  ‘Jump in now!’ my father yelled at Borden. ‘It will go in the next few seconds!’

  Borden took a step forward until he was at the edge of the zone of electricity. My father was beside him, while Nicky was reaching out with his arms, screaming and screaming for his daddy. Waving blue snakes of discharge moved crazily a fraction of an inch in front of Borden. His hair rose from his scalp, and I could see him clenching and unclenching his fists. His head drooped briefly forward, and as it did so one of the tendrils instantly found him, snaking down his neck, around his shoulders and back, splattering noisily on the floor between his shoes.

  He leapt back in terror, and I felt sorry for him.

  ‘I can’t do it!’ he gasped. ‘Turn the bloody thing off!’

  ‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it?’

  My father was filled with madness. He stepped forward, away from Clive Borden, and into the deadly barrage of electricity. Half a dozen tentacles instantly wound themselves around him and the boy, imbuing them both with the lethal cyanic glow. All the hairs on his head were standing on end, making him more terrible than ever I had seen him.

  He threw Nicky into the pit.

  My father stepped back, away from the deadly barrage.

  As Nicky fell, his arms and legs scrabbling wildly at the air, he screamed again, one despairing yell. It was a single sustained outburst of sheer terror, loneliness and fear of abandonment.

  Before he hit the ground the device exploded with light. Flames leapt from the overhead wires, and a crash rang out violently. The wooden struts seemed to swell outwards with the pressure from within, and as the tentacles of light withdrew into themselves they did so with a screech as of sharp steel sliding against steel.

  Horribly, it had ended. Thick blue smoke hung heavily in the air, spreading torpidly outwards across the ceiling of the cellar. The device was at last silent, and doing nothing. Nicky lay motionless on the hard floor beneath the structure.

  Somewhere in the distance, it seemed, I could hear his terrible scream echoing still.

  7

  My eyes were half blind from the brilliant dazzle of the electric flares; my ears were singing from the assault of the noise; my mind ran deliriously with the shock of what I had witnessed.

  I walked forward, drawn by the sight of that smoking pit. Now still and apparently in repose, it was full of threat, yet even so I felt myself drawn inexorably to it. Soon I was standing at the edge, beside my mother. My hand went up, as so often before, and folded itself into her fingers. She too was staring down in revulsion and disbelief.

  Nicky was dead. His face had frozen in death as he screamed, and his arms and legs were twisted, a snapshot of his flailing as he was thrown into the pit by my father. He lay on his back. His hair had horripilated as he went through the electric field, and it stood up around his petrified face.

  Clive Borden emitted a dreadful howl of misery, anger and despair, and leapt down into the pit. He threw himself on the ground, wrapped his arms around the body of his son, tried tenderly to pull the boy’s limbs back to their normal position, cradled the boy’s head with a hand, pressed his face against the boy’s cheek, all the while shaking with terrible sobs coming from deep within him.

  And my mother, as if realising for the first time that I was there beside her, suddenly swept her arms around me, pressed my face into her skirt, then lifted me up. She walked quickly across the cellar, bearing me away from the scene of the disaster.

  I was facing back over her shoulder, and as we went quickly out to the staircase my last sight was of my father. He was staring down into the pit, and his face bore such an expression of harsh satisfaction that more than two decades later I can still remember it only with a shudder of repulsion.

  My father had known what would happen, he had allowed it to happen, he had made it happen. Everything about his stance and his expression said: I’ve proved my point.

  I noticed also that Stimpson, the servant, was crouching on the floor, balancing himself with his hands. His head was bowed.

  8

  I’ve lost, or suppressed, all memories of what happened in the immediate aftermath. I only recall being at school during the following year, and then changing schools, making new friends, gradually growing up through childhood. There was a rush of normality around me, like a flood of embarrassed compensation for the appalling scene I had witnessed.

  Nor can I remember when my father walked out of his marriage, leaving us behind. I know the date it happened, because I found it in the diary my mother kept in the last years of her life, but my own memory of that time is lost. Because of her diary I also know most of her feelings about the split-up, and a little of what caused it. For my part I remember a general sense of his being there when I was small, an unnerving and unpredictable figure, thankfully at a remove from our day-to-day lives. I also remember life afterwards without him, a strong sense of his absence, a tranquillity that Rosalie and I made the most of and which has continued ever since.

  I was glad at first that he went. It was only when I was older that I began to miss him, as I do now. I believe he must be alive still, because otherwise we would have heard. Our estate is complicated to run, and my father is still responsible for that. There is a family trust, administered by solicitors in Derby, and they are apparently in touch with him. The house and land and title are still in his name. Many of the direct charges, such as taxation, are dealt with and paid by the trust, and money is still made available to Rosalie and me.

  Our last direct contact with him was about five years ago, when he wrote a letter from South Africa. Passing through, he said, although he didn’t say where from or where to. He is in his seventies now, probably hanging out somewhere with other British exiles, not letting on about his background. Harmless, a bit dotty, vague on details, an old Foreign Office hand. I can’t forget him. No matter how much time passes, I always remember him as the cruel-faced man who threw a small boy into a machine he must have known would certainly kill him.

  9

  Clive Borden left the house the same night. I’ve no idea what happened to Nicky’s body, although I believe Borden must have taken it with him.

  Because I was so young I accepted my parents’ authority as final and when they told me the police would not be interested in the boy’s death, I believed them. In the event, they seemed to be right.

  Years later, when I was old enough to realise how wrong it was, I tried to ask my mother what had happened. This was after my father had left home, and about two years before she died.

  It felt to me then as if the time had come to clear up the mysteries of the past, to put some of the darkness behind us. I also saw it as a sign of my own growing up. I wanted her to be frank with me and treat me like an adult. I knew she had received a letter from my father earlier that week, and it gave me an excuse to bring up the subject.

  ‘Why did the police never come round to ask questions?’ I said, when I had made it plain that I wanted to talk about that night.

  She said, ‘We do never talk about that, Katherine.’

  ‘You mean that you never do,’ I said. ‘But why did Daddy leave home?’

  ‘You would have to ask him that.’

  ‘You know I can’t,’ I said. ‘You’re the only one who knows. He did something wrong that night, but I’m not sure why and I’m not even sure how. Are the police looking for him?’

  ‘The police aren’t involved in our lives.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Didn’t Daddy kill that boy? Wasn’t that murder?’

  ‘It was all dealt with at the time. There is nothing to hide, nothing to feel guilty about. We paid the price for what happened that night. Mr Borden suffered most, of course, but look what it has done to all our lives. I can tell you nothing you want to know. You saw for yourself what happened.’

  ‘I can’t believe that’s the e
nd of it,’ I said.

  ‘Katherine, you should know better than to ask these questions. You were there too. You’re as guilty as the rest of us.’

  ‘I was only five years old!’ I said. ‘How could that possibly make me guilty of something?’

  ‘If you’re in any doubt you could establish that by going to the police yourself.’

  My courage failed me in the face of her cold and unyielding demeanour. Mr and Mrs Stimpson still worked for us then, and later I asked Stimpson the same questions. Politely, stiffly, tersely, he denied all knowledge of anything that might have taken place.

  10

  My mother died when I was eighteen. Rosalie and I half-expected news of it to bring our father out of exile, but it did not. We stayed on in the house, and slowly it dawned on us that the place was ours. We reacted differently. Rosalie gradually freed herself psychologically of the place, and in the end she moved away. I began to be trapped by it, and I’m still here. A large part of what held me was the feeling of guilt I could not throw off, about what had happened down there in the cellar. Everything centred on those events, and in the end I realised I would have to do something about purging myself of what happened.

  I finally plucked up my courage and went down to the cellar to discover if anything of what I had seen was still there.

  I chose to do it on a day in summer, when friends were visiting from Sheffield and the house was full of the sounds of rock music and the talk and laughter of young people. I told no one what I was planning, but simply slipped away from a conversation in the garden and walked into the house. I was braced with three glasses of wine.

  The lock on the door had been changed soon after the Borden visit, and when my mother died I had it changed again, although I had never actually ventured inside. Mr Stimpson and his wife were long gone, but they and the housekeepers who came after them used the cellar for storage. I had always been too nervous even to go to the top of the steps.