The Prestige

by Christopher Priest

  By then it was too late; the apparatus was in operation and I was committed to completing the trick.

  At this point in the show nothing can be modified. Even my chosen target area is fixed. Setting the coordinates is too intricate and time-consuming to be done at any time other than before a performance. The previous night I had set the apparatus for both of yesterday’s performances so that I would arrive in the highest loge at stage left, which by arrangement with the management was kept empty for both shows. The loge was at the same approximate height as the main balcony and could be seen from almost every other part of the auditorium.

  I had arranged it so that I should materialise on the very rail of the box itself, picked out by the follow-spot, facing down into the stalls a long way below, apparently struggling to keep my balance, arms windmilling, body jerking wildly, and so on. Everything had gone exactly to plan during the first performance, and my magical transformation brought screams, roars of warnings and shouts of alarm from the audience, followed by thunderous applause as I swung down to the stage on the rope thrown to me by Hester.

  To arrive on the rail of the loge facing down to the audience, I have to stand inside the Tesla apparatus with my back towards the loge. The audience cannot know it, of course, but the position in which I arrange my body is exactly recreated at the instant of arrival. From my place inside the apparatus I could not therefore see where I was about to arrive.

  With Borden somewhere around, a terrible certainty struck me that he was about to sabotage me yet again! What if he was lurking inside the loge, and gave me a shove as I arrived on the ledge? I felt the electrical tension mounting ineluctably around me. I could not prevent myself turning anxiously around to look up at the box. I could just make it out through the deadly blue-white electrical sparks. All seemed well. There was nothing there to block my arrival, and although I couldn’t see into the box itself, where the seats are placed, it did not look as if anyone was there.

  Borden’s intent was much more sinister, and a moment later I found out what it was. In the very instant that I turned to look up at the loge, two things happened simultaneously.

  The first was that the transmission of my body actually began.

  The second was that electrical power to the apparatus cut out, disconnecting the current instantly. The blue fires vanished, the electrical field died.

  I remained on the stage, standing within the wooden cage of the apparatus in full view of the audience. I was staring over my shoulder at the loge.

  The transmission had been interrupted! But it had begun before it was stopped, and now I could see an image of myself on the rail.

  There was my ghost, my doppelgänger, momentarily frozen in the stance I had adopted when I turned to look, half twisted, half crouching, looking away and up.

  It was a thin, insubstantial copy of myself, a partial prestige.

  Even as I looked, this image of myself straightened in alarm, threw out his arms, and collapsed backwards and out of sight into the loge itself!

  Appalled at what I had seen I stepped forward out of the coils of the Tesla cage. On cue, the spotlight came on, illuminating the whole loge to pick out my intended materialisation. The people in the audience looked up at the loge, already half anticipating the trick. They started to applaud, but just as quickly the noise faded away to nothing. There was nothing to see.

  I stood alone on the stage. My illusion was ruined.

  ‘Curtain!’ I yelled into the wings. ‘Bring down the curtain!’

  It seemed to take an eternity but at last the technician heard me and the curtain came down, separating me from the audience. Hester appeared at a run. Her cue for a return to the stage was when I was taking my applause from the loge rail, and not before.

  ‘What happened?’ she cried.

  ‘That man who came up from the audience. Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know! I thought he went back to his seat.’

  ‘He got backstage somehow. You are supposed to make sure these people leave the stage!’

  I pushed her aside angrily and lifted up the reinforced fabric of the curtain. At a crouch I stepped beneath it and went forward to the footlights. The house lights were now on, and the audience was moving into the aisles and slowly up to the exits. The people were obviously puzzled and disgruntled, but they were paying no more attention to the stage.

  I looked up at the box. The spotlight had been turned off, and in the bland house lights I could still see nothing.

  A woman screamed once, then again. She was somewhere in the building behind the loges.

  I walked quickly into the wings and met Wilson as he was hurrying to the stage to find me.

  Breathlessly, because now I found my lungs inexplicably labouring, I instructed him to dismantle and crate up the apparatus as quickly as possible. I dashed past him and gained access to the stairs to the balcony and loges. Members of the audience were walking down, and as I started up the stairs, weaving between them, they grumbled at me for lack of manners, and apparently not because they identified me as the performer who had just so spectacularly failed before them. The anonymity of failure is sudden.

  Every step I took was harder to complete. My breath was rattling in my throat, and I could feel my heart pounding as if I had just run a mile uphill. I have always kept myself fit, and physical exercise has never been much of a problem for me, but suddenly I felt as if I were lame and overweight. By the time I was at the top of only the first short flight of steps I could go no further, and the crowd walking down the stairs was forced to step past me as I leaned on the wrought-iron banisters to catch my breath. I rested for a few seconds, then launched myself up the next flight of steps.

  I had taken no more than two steps when I was racked with a terrifying cough, one of such violence that it astounded me. I was at the end of my physical tether. My heart was hammering, blood was thumping rhythmically in my ears, sweat was bursting from me, and the dry, painful cough was one that seemed to evacuate and collapse my chest. It weakened me so greatly that I could barely inhale again, and when I did manage to suck in a little air I coughed again at once, wheezing and racking horribly. I was unable to stay upright, and I slumped forward across the stone steps, while the last few of the theatregoers went past, their boots only inches from my pathetic head. I neither knew nor cared what they thought of me as I lay there.

  Wilson eventually found me. He raised me into his arms, and held me like a child while I struggled to regain my breath.

  At long last my heart and breathing steadied, and a great chill descended on me. My chest felt like a swollen pustule of pain, and although I was able to prevent myself coughing again each breath was tentatively taken and expelled.

  Finally, I managed to say, ‘Did you see what happened?’

  ‘Alfred Borden must have got backstage, sir.’

  ‘Not that! I mean what happened when the power failed?’

  ‘I was manning the switching board, Mr Angier. As usual.’

  Wilson’s place during IN A FLASH is at the back of the stage, invisible to the audience because he is concealed by the backcloth of the screening box. Although he is in contact at every moment with what I am doing he cannot actually see me for most of the illusion.

  I gasped out a description of the spectral prestige of myself that I had briefly seen. Wilson seemed puzzled, but immediately offered to run up to the loge itself. He did so, while I lay helplessly and uncomfortably on the cold bare steps. When he returned a minute or two later Wilson said the seats in the top loge had been scattered across the carpeted floor, but otherwise there was nothing unusual about it. I had to accept what he said. I have learned that Wilson is a sharp and reliable assistant.

  He got me back down the stairs and on to the stage again. By this time I had recovered sufficiently that I could stand unsupported. I scanned the top loge and the rest of the now empty auditorium, but there was no sign of the prestige.

  I had to put the matter out of my mind. Of much
more pressing concern was the fact that I had suddenly become physically incapacitated. Every movement was a strain, and the cough felt explosively coiled in my chest, ready to burst out at any moment. Dreading a return of it I deliberately cramped and confined my movements, trying to calm my breathing.

  Wilson hired a cab and returned me safely to my hotel, and at once arranged for a message to be sent to Julia. A doctor was summoned, and when he belatedly arrived he carried out a perfunctory examination of me. He declared he could find nothing amiss, so I paid him off and resolved to find another doctor in the morning. I had trouble falling asleep, but I did so in the end.

  I awoke this morning feeling stronger, and walked downstairs unaided. Wilson was waiting for me in the hotel foyer, with the news that Julia would be arriving at noon. Meanwhile, he declared that I looked unwell, but I insisted I had started to recover. After breakfast, though, I realised I had little strength in me.

  Reluctantly, I have cancelled both of today’s performances, and while Wilson has been at the theatre I have penned this account of what happened.

  In London 22nd May 1903

  At Julia’s urging, and on Wilson’s advice, I have cancelled the remainder of the Lowestoft booking. Next week’s has also gone – this was to be a short season at the Court Theatre in Highgate. I am still undecided what to do about the show at the Astoria in Derby, scheduled for the first week in June.

  I am trying to put as good a face as possible on the matter, but in the deepest recess of my heart I am harbouring a secret fear. In short, it is that my ill health might mean I shall never again be able to perform. After Borden’s attack on me I have become a semi-invalid.

  Counting the man who came to see me in the hotel in Lowestoft, and my own here in London, I have been examined by three doctors. All of them pronounce me well and showing no obvious symptoms of illness. I complain about my breathing, so they listen to my chest and prescribe fresh air. I tell them my heart races when I walk up a flight of stairs, and they listen to my heart and they tell me to be careful about what I eat, and to take things more slowly. I say that I tire easily, and they advise me to rest and to go to bed early.

  My regular doctor in London took a sample of my blood, because I demanded that he should make some objective test, if only to quieten my fears. He duly reported that my blood was unusually ‘thin’, that such a condition was not unusual in a man of my age, and he prescribed an iron tonic.

  After the doctor had left I took the simple step of weighing myself, with an astonishing result.

  I appear to have lost nearly thirty pounds in weight. I have weighed more or less exactly twelve stone, one hundred and sixty-eight pounds, for most of my adult years. It is just one of those things in life that has remained constant. This morning I found that I weigh just over one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, or a fraction under ten stone.

  In the mirror I look the same as ever. My face is no thinner, my eyes are not bloodshot, my cheekbones do not jut, my jaw is not angular. I look tired, indeed, and there is a sallow quality to my skin that is not customary, but I do not look like someone who cannot climb a short flight of stairs without gasping for breath halfway up. Nor do I look like someone who has just lost nearly a sixth of his normal weight.

  There being no normal or logical reason for this, it must have been caused by the incomplete Tesla transmission. The first shock of it had taken place. Following this, the electrical information was only partially sent. Borden’s interruption came before the second shock occurred, preventing full reassembly at either end.

  Once again his intervention has taken me to the edge of death!

  Later

  Julia has declared herself to be on a mission to restore my strength by fattening me up, and lunch today was substantial. However, halfway through I felt tired and nauseated, and was unable to finish. I have just been taking a short nap.

  On waking, I was seized by an idea, whose consequences I am still thinking through.

  In the confidentiality of these pages let me disclose that whenever I have used the Tesla apparatus, whether it be in performance or rehearsal, I have always made sure to secrete two or three gold coins in my pocket. Why I should do so must be self-evident. My recent acquisition of a financial fortune is not solely attributable to performance fees.

  Tesla, I should in all conscience report, warned me against such an act. He is a highly moral man, and he lectured me long on the subject of forgery. He said he also had scientific reasons, that the apparatus was calibrated for my known body-weight (with certain margins of safety), and that the presence about my person of small but massy objects, such as gold coins, could make the projection inaccurate over longer distances.

  Because I trust Tesla’s scientific knowledge, at first I decided to take only paper money through with me, but in doing so I created the inevitable difficulty of duplicate serial numbers. I still carry a few high denomination notes at every performance, but in most cases I have preferred to carry gold. I have never encountered any of the problems of inaccuracy of which Tesla warned, perhaps because the distances I travel are so short.

  This afternoon, after my nap, I searched for the three coins I had been carrying in my pocket on Tuesday evening. As soon as I held them I felt certain they weighed less than they did before, and when I placed them on my office balance, comparing them with otherwise identical coins that had not been through the transmitter, I discovered they were in fact lighter.

  I calculate that they too have lost about seventeen per cent of their mass. They look the same, they have the same dimensions as ordinary coins, they even make the same ringing sound when dropped on a stone floor, but somehow or other they have lost some of their weight.

  29th May 1903

  The week has shown no improvement. I remain debilitated. Although I am well, in that I have no fever, no apparent injuries, no pain, no sickness, in spite of all this as soon as I make any physical effort I am overtaken with fatigue. Julia continues to try to feed me back to health, but I have made only a marginal gain in weight. We both pretend I am improving, but in doing so we are denying what is obvious to us both – I shall never recover the part of me that has gone.

  In this enforced physical languor my mind continues to work normally, which adds to the frustration.

  Reluctantly, but on the advice of everyone close to me, I have cancelled all future bookings. To distract myself I have been running the Tesla apparatus, and passing through it a quantity of gold. I am not greedy, and I do not wish to draw unwelcome attention to myself by becoming excessively wealthy. I need only enough money to ensure the long term well-being of myself and my family. At the end of each session I weigh each coin carefully, but all is well.

  Tomorrow, we return to Caldlow House.

  In Derbyshire 18th July 1903

  The Great Danton is dead. The demise of the illusionist Rupert Angier came as a result of injuries sustained when a trick went wrong during a performance at the Pavilion Theatre in Lowestoft. He died at his home in Highgate, London, and leaves a widow and three children.

  The 14th Earl of Colderdale remains alive, if not in the rudest of health. He has had the mixed pleasure of reading his own obituary in The Times, a privilege not granted to many. Of course the obituary was unsigned, but I was able to deduce that it had not been written by Borden. The assessment of my career is naturally shown in a fair and positive light, but in addition I detect no jealousy, no undercurrent of subtle resentment, usually perceptible on these occasions when a rival is invited to record the passing of one of his colleagues. I am relieved that Borden was not involved in this at least.

  Rupert Angier’s affairs are now in the hands of a firm of lawyers. He is of course really dead, and his body was really placed inside the coffin. This I saw as Angier’s last illusion: the provision of his own corpse for burial. Julia is officially his widow, and his children are orphans. They were all present at Highgate Cemetery for his funeral, a ceremony kept strictly to his immediate family. The
press stayed away at the personal request of the widow, and no fans or admirers were seen on the day.

  On that same day I was myself travelling back anonymously to Derbyshire with Adam Wilson and his family. He and Gertrude have agreed to remain with me as paid companions. I am able to reward them well.

  Julia and the children arrived back here three days later. For the time being she is the widow Angier, but as we fade from people’s recollections she will quietly become, as is her right, Lady Colderdale.

  I thought I had grown familiar with surviving my own death, but this time I have done it in a way that I can never repeat. Because I can not go back to the stage, and because I am now in the rôle that my elder brother had previously denied me, I find myself wondering how I am to fill the days that lie ahead.

  After the disagreeable shock of what happened to me in Lowestoft, I have settled down to what has become my new existence. I am not in decline, and my condition remains stable. I have little physical energy or strength, but I do not seem likely to drop dead suddenly. The doctor here repeats what I was told in London: there is nothing apparently the matter with me that good food, exercise and a positive outlook will not cure in time.

  So I find myself taking up the life I had briefly planned after I returned from Colorado. There is much to attend to in the house and around the estate, and because nothing has been run properly for years much of it is in decay. Fortunately, for once my family has the financial wherewithal to tackle some of the most serious problems.

  I have had Wilson erect the Tesla apparatus in the basement, telling him that from time to time I shall be rehearsing IN A FLASH in preparation for my return to the stage. Its real use is, of course, otherwise.

  19th September 1903

  Merely to record that today is the day I had originally planned for the death of Rupert Angier. It has passed like all the others, quietly and (given my continuing restlessness about my health) peacefully.