Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms

by Lissa Evans

Stuart looked around, and the world swum in and out of focus. It was like being in the depths of a dream and yet he could feel the seat beneath him, could smell the gaslight, could hear the murmur of the audience, and see the flutter of the ladies’ fans. No one was raising a hand.

  “A volunteer is required!” repeated the Great Hortini. He stepped to the front of the stage. “And are there none?” he asked. “Are you all, perhaps, just a little afraid of change?”

  He smiled, and a chuckle swept across the audience. “Then I shall have to choose someone.” His eyes swept across the rows. “You there,” he said, pointing directly at Stuart. “The lad in the blue trousers. Come onto the stage, if you will.”

  There was a scatter of applause, and Stuart found himself on his feet and moving like a sleepwalker along the aisle and up the steps that led up to the stage. The Great Hortini nodded at him and then addressed the audience once again.

  “The Cabinet of Curious Change, ladies and gentlemen, is a wonder of our age, a simple container that can utterly transform its contents. We have here an ordinary boy—” He placed a hand on Stuart’s shoulder and glanced down at him.

  “Your name, my lad,” he asked.

  “Stuart Horten,” said Stuart. And the Great Hortini’s expression changed to one of incredulity.

  And in that instant the world seemed to snap into focus, clear and sharp, bright and real, and Stuart knew that he was actually there, not dreaming, not hallucinating, but standing on the stage of a theater a hundred years or more before he was born.

  A hush fell.

  The Great Hortini knelt on one knee so that he was on Stuart’s level. “Not an ordinary boy at all,” he said very quietly. “An exceptional boy. The right sort of boy. You’re the one who found my note, aren’t you?”

  “Your note?”

  “That I left in the tin: My workshop and all it contains is yours it you can find it …”

  “I found the note,” said Stuart. “And I found the workshop.”

  “Then you’re the right sort of boy to have it.” He nodded gravely. “Well done, Stuart.”

  “So you mean you’re my great-uncle? You’re Teeny-Tiny Tony Horten?”

  “I was once. And then I followed my Lily into the world that she’d wished for, a world before sirens and bombs. And in this older world I needed a new name. I became the Great Hortini, the wonder of the Victorian stage, but the Great Hortini is, and always was, and always shall be, Tony Horten.”

  He paused, and in the moment of silence Stuart realized that there was not a whisper from the audience, not a hiss from the gas-burners, not a creak from the stage. More than that, there was no movement—the audience sat like wooden dummies, the flames looked like a row of folded orange napkins.

  “What’s happening?” asked Stuart. He moved his shoulders uneasily; he could feel a pressure on them as if they were being gripped.

  The Great Hortini stood and looked around, his expression sharp and quizzical. “You used a threepence to get here?” he asked.

  “The very last one. It was damaged, though, bent right across the middle. And I made a sort of accidental wish.”

  “What was it?”

  “That I’d know where you’d disappeared to.”

  The pressure on his shoulders was increasing. It was as if he could still feel Jeannie’s hands.

  “What’s happening?” he asked again, staring at the frozen faces in the audience,

  “I think I know,” said the Great Hortini. “Imagine if you threw a stone into the air—it would travel upward, hang for a split second, and then fall. The imperfect coin, the last threepence, slung you into the past and this is the briefest of pauses before you begin your return journey. You could say that for a single moment, we are outside time.” He smiled and held out his hand. “It has been an honor to meet you, young man. A great and unexpected honor. You brought Leonora back to us, and we shall always, always be grateful. She describes you as a fellow of great pluck and resourcefulness, and I can see that she is right. Enjoy the workshop. It has many surprises.”

  Stuart shook his hand, and as he did so the air seemed to stir, as if ruffled by a breeze.

  Someone in the audience coughed, someone else rustled a program, the flames leaped and trembled, and the theater was suddenly alive again.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” announced the Great Hortini, moving seamlessly back into his role as performer, “my lovely wife, Lily, will escort this young fellow into the Cabinet of Curious Change.”

  Stuart felt his hand being taken and he looked up to see Lily smiling down at him. He tried to smile back but the invisible hold on his shoulders was growing painful now, and the world was becoming dreamlike again. He stepped into the cabinet, turned around, and saw the door close on him.

  In the darkness Great-Uncle Tony’s voice was still quite audible: “… we shall now revolve the Cabinet of Curious Change three times in a clockwise direction …”

  The floor began to twist under Stuart’s feet and he placed his hands on the walls to steady himself. He could feel the hurricane beginning again, the same one that had dragged him into the past.

  “… and now we shall revolve the cabinet in the reverse direction three times. You see, ladies and gentlemen that there are no hidden compartments, no wires, no trap doors …”

  As the magical wind tore and tugged at Stuart, the grip on his shoulders loosened and then broke, and he felt himself being whirled into the storm. He was no longer in the darkness of the cabinet but flying above the heads of the audience, staring down at the stage. The scene seemed to shudder before his eyes like a faulty film.

  “The curious change is complete!” announced the Great Hortini. “Let us see how our young volunteer has fared.”

  Lily stepped forward and opened the door, and before the flickering darkness once again engulfed Stuart, he saw that the cabinet wasn’t empty. Someone was standing inside it, someone that he recognized.

  It was Jeannie. And she looked absolutely furious.

  In the room beneath the bandstand, April scrambled to her feet and stared open-mouthed at the empty space beside the Well of Wishes, where, just a second earlier, Stuart and Jeannie had been standing.

  “But—” she said.

  Clifford, the dove still cooing on his shoulder, took a step forward. “Where—?” he asked.

  “OW!” yelled Stuart, crashing to the floor out of nowhere. “That hurt!” he remarked, rubbing his hip, and then looked up to see two dazed faces looking down at him.

  “Where have you come from?” asked April.

  “Where did you go to?” asked Clifford.

  Stuart shook his head, still full of the thunder of the journey.

  “And where’s Jeannie?” added Clifford.

  “It’s a long story,” said Stuart, getting up slowly. “A very long story.”

  Before he could say more, there was noise behind them—a clatter of footsteps on the fireman’s ladder—and they all turned to see a man climbing down. He had a keen expression and a camera slung over his shoulder.

  “Well, wow!” he said, jumping the last two rungs to the floor and looking around. “This is incredible! I’m Dave Harper, incidentally, from the East Midlands Gazette, I was just talking to the mayoress earlier. Where is she?”

  Clifford and April looked at Stuart.

  He thought hard. “Meeting new people,” he said.

  “Oh, right.” Dave Harper raised his camera and snapped a couple of photos of the Well of Wishes. “Well, she was being very mysterious about what was down here. Don’t suppose you can tell me anything about it?”

  Stuart took a deep breath. “It was the workshop of Tony Horten, a magician often known by his stage name of Teeny-Tiny Tony Horten. He started his stage career in the nineteen-thirties, and he designed and built all his own illusions, inspired by the famous Victorian stage engineers, such as the Great Hortini, whose real name was also Horten. He was the inventor of the Horten Ready-Release, a safety catch u
sed on many of his greatest illusions, including the Book of Peril which you can see over there to your right.”

  Dave Harper glanced at the giant book and then looked back at Stuart, his expression baffled.

  “But how do know all that?” he asked. “How do you know so much about this workshop?”

  Stuart grinned.

  The answer was simple and wonderful and true.

  “Because it’s mine,” he said.

  THE END

  COMING IN FALL 2012!

  Stuart Horten’s mysteriously strange adventures continue in

  HORTEN’S INCREDIBLE ILLUSIONS…

  Inside the dusty side room of the Beeton Museum, Stuart wrote “THE PHAROAH’S PYRAMID” in large, careful letters at the top of the page, and then underlined it. Twice.

  He put down the paper and stood on tiptoe, gripped the nearest snake-shaped handle, and pulled. The whole triangular side immediately swung down, cracking him on the head. Rubbing his skull for a moment, he crouched down and stepped inside the pyramid.

  Stuart ran his fingertips over the walls and felt, near the top of each, a little loop of metal, just big enough to hook a finger into and colored the same jet-black as the rest of the surface. He hooked his finger and heaved. The side began to swing shut.

  There was a loud and definitive click, and Stuart found himself in utter darkness. Then nine or ten stars twinkled from each wall; as he twisted around to look at them, a glimpse of red on the floor caught his eye. One single star shone from the center of it.

  Stuart reached out to touch it, and his fingers felt a series of grooves: six of them, like the spokes of a wheel. He delved into his pocket and took out the metal star. It would fit, he just knew it would.

  Heart trotting, mouth dry, he slotted the star into place. The effect was instantaneous. All four sides of the pyramid fell open with a noise like a thunderclap, and Stuart screamed.

  Instead of the Beeton Museum, Stuart saw a sweep of grayish sand, peppered with rocks. A few low thorn trees were the only vegetation; not far away, a camel was grazing on one of them. The air was cold, damp, and misty; the sky a dirty white. Overhead, a large, dark bird was circling.

  Stuart Horten was in the middle of a desert.

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