The Houdini Effect

by Bill Nagelkerke

  ‘I couldn’t tie you up or anything like that. People would be suspicious.’

  ‘But you’ll do it? Be my assistant?’

  ‘Hang on, I didn’t say that. I was just speculating.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s nothing as obvious as tying me up,’ said Harry. ‘Of course the audience would smell a rat.’

  ‘Then what am I be supposed to be doing? If I do it.’

  ‘Be glamorous,’ Harry said. ‘And diverting.’

  ‘Glamorous? Diverting?’

  He nodded. ‘You’ve got it. See, a lot of magicians have a glamorous assistant. It’s not as if they need someone to make the trick work but

  diversionary tactics can sometimes be really useful.’

  ‘Let me ask you two things,’ I said, slowly. ‘Are you saying you need me just to be a ‘diversionary tactic’? And, assuming I’d let myself

  be used like that, what exactly do you consider to be a ‘glamorous’ look?’

  He answered the second question first, but maybe because it answered the first one as well.

  ‘Well, you’re not exactly the sort of glamorous I’d want but if you wore your togs . . . ’ he said.

  ‘My what?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be your bikini,’ he said quickly.

  ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘I thought you could dress in your one-piece thingy and perhaps put something frilly around it and throw on some glitter and stuff. That’d be enough.’

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. ‘You must be crazy to even think that I’d parade around on stage in next to nothing,’ I said, ‘just to make your act look good.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s sexist.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The whole glamorous assistant thing of course. ‘Why don’t you dress in your togs?’

  ‘I’d planned to for the straitjacket escape, if I’d been able to do it.’

  ‘Why on earth would you have done that?’

  ‘I would have had to, you see. Escapology is all about being transparent. The audience would have had to be convinced that I didn’t have knives or scissors or keys or other aids and devices to help

  me escape. But this new routine’s going to be completely different.’

  ‘You bet it is. No way am I doing what you’re asking.’

  Much to my surprise (and shock I have to say)

  Harry suddenly gave up on me and turned annoyed and spiteful. ‘You’ll never be glamorous,’ he said, ‘especially not in your swimsuit and even more especially not in your bikini. You’d only ever look good if you threw a bin bag over your head. I was only being kind, asking you in the first place. I’ll find someone else. Selfish bra-stuffer.’

  Bra-stuffer! How the hell did he know about that?

  ‘Not in a million years,’ I said as Harry stomped off to his room and I stomped off to mine. ‘Fossip!’ I hurled after him.

  Very satisfying.

  A list of DEEP THOUGHTS

  (Lists are generally helpful but not always. This one wasn’t.)

  Why did I feel so down after the encounter with Harry? Several likely reasons (not necessarily in priority order):

  guilt about turning down’s Harry request

  anger at Harry’s insults (and his insights)

  the sad tales of Iris and Laurie, May and Barry, me and Troy (the last of those over before it’d ever begun)

  wondering what Mum and Dad really thought of each other

  knowing that when we all eventually get older

  and time passes, after a while there will be some things that can’t ever be changed and damages that can’t be repaired

  and it goes without saying, of course, that there were the mirrors. I was the one who needed help

  with those, but who could help me?

  Whatever the reason, or reasons, I felt compelled to go after Harry and make things right before it was too late. (At the same time I was sure there was a major flaw – many flaws, major and minor - in this plan but I deliberately didn’t stop to con-sider what those might be.)

  The new routine

  ‘Oh just piss off,’ Harry called when I knocked on his door, which made me think he’d decoded what I’d said at our last encounter. Probably just coincidence though.

  ‘Look,’ I said, not wasting any time, getting right to the point, ‘if you drop the bikini idea . . . ‘

  ‘It was a one-piece swim suit, not bikini, if you remember,’ he snarled at me.

  ‘Okay, one-piece swimsuit then, whatever. If you can forget about me wearing that or anything like it and as long as it’s not just about being glamorous then I’ll . . .’ (what on earth was I letting myself in for?) ‘ . . . then I’ll be your stage assistant.’

  I heard Harry pattering to the door.

  ‘For real?’ he said, opening it.

  ‘Yes, for real. Really. But only for the first audition to begin with,’ I added quickly. ‘I’ll have

  to see how things progress from there. Not that

  you’re likely to get any further than the auditions.’

  ‘You wanna bet?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not the betting kind of girl,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Harry. ‘But your help would be great. Thanks. And it won’t be just glam for the

  sake of glam. The distraction is serious stuff.’

  Tell me about it, I thought. That’s exactly how I

  feel right now, seriously distracted. But I breathed a silent sigh of relief. Not everything was lost between Harry and me, after all.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ I said. ‘But you’ll have to tell me what it is you’re going to do and what you expect me to do.’

  ‘Mainly wave and point,’ Harry said. ‘That’s the distraction part.’

  ‘Sounds simple enough,’ I said.

  ‘The timing’s going to be really important,’ Harry emphasized. ‘It’ll take practise.’

  ‘What will I have to wave and point at?’ I asked.

  Harry looked round furtively as if there might be spying magicians listening in to our conversation. In the sudden stillness we heard the underground slithering of Dad beneath the floorboards, somewhere close by. Harry smiled. ‘The new routine won’t be that different from what Dad’s doing now,’ he said, ominously. ‘Come with me. I’ll show you.’

  As I followed him I remembered the flaw I’d overlooked. The talent quest, auditions included, was going to be televised.

  Exposure and humiliation on a grand scale were the only likely outcomes of my kindness towards Harry. But it was too late to back down now. Harry would never have talked to me again if I

  had.

  The chest

  Harry led me to the garage, a minefield of odds

  and ends. There was no room for the car, that’s how bad it was. Dad kept his building materials in

  there: sawhorses, various tools, pots of paint, a mobile scaffold almost as big as a car, the works. But not only those things. Dad was a collector. He kept and hoarded stuff from previous houses. Sometimes he went to garage sales and picked up rubbish he thought would come in useful some day. Maybe some of it would, but when was anybody’s guess. You name it, the garage was where you’d find it. If you could find ‘it’ among all the junk. Right then the place was at its worst, since no one had had time to sort out anything following the move. Maybe no one ever would get round to sorting it. Who, except Dad, would want to?

  Harry manoeuvred his way to a dusty heap in the far corner.

  ‘What’s down there?’ I asked.

  Harry began to drag various unrecognisable objects aside. ‘This is where I saw it last,’ he said. ‘I remembered it after I’d had a look at my illusions books again, like you told me to. I thought, it’ll be perfect.’

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘This.’ Harry heaved at another object, something large and wooden. ‘Give me a hand.’

  Together we dragged the thing into the light.

>   ‘Great isn’t it?’ said Harry.

  It was a wooden box. It looked a little bit like a

  pirates’ treasure chest. It had a curved lid and two metal bands that fastened the lid to the box.

  ‘Reckon I can fit inside?’ Harry asked.

  ‘No trouble. It would fit me, too,’ I said. ‘Not that I’d ever try to get inside,’ I added quickly,

  thinking of Dad in the claustrophobic darkness under the house.

  Harry gave me a furtive glance. Then he patted

  the chest as if it was a beastly friend. ‘Houdini did a trick like this. Escaped from a locked chest. Amazing.’

  ‘You are not going to be shut into that thing are you,’ I said.

  ‘Course I am,’ said Harry. ‘And I’m going to escape from it.’

  ‘How on earth can that be any easier than getting out of a straitjacket,’ I asked.

  ‘It’ll be much easier,’ said Harry.

  ‘How?’ I repeated.

  Once more Harry looked around furtively. ‘I’m swearing you to secrecy,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

  He waited for me to reply.

  ‘Okay, okay, I won’t breath a word,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to make some modifications to it,’ said Harry. (Wow, big secret!)

  ‘I’ll show you later what they are,’ he promised. ‘When I’ve made them.’

  ‘You’d better to check with Dad first and find out if you’re even allowed to have the thing,’ I told him. ‘Especially if you’re going to muck around with it - modify it I should say.’

  ‘Huh!’ Harry laughed. ‘He doesn't even remember it’s here,’ he said. ‘Won’t miss it. No worries about that.’

  ‘Hmm, yes, well, you’re probably right as far as that goes.’ I shrugged, unwilling to argue anymore about it. ‘Okay, best of luck then. When do I come into the picture?’

  ‘When I’m ready,’ said Harry. ‘It shouldn’t take

  long. I know what I have to do with it. Soon as it’s finished, I’ll let you know. I’ll get on with it right away. Then we can start rehearsals.’

  ‘Rehearsals?’

  ‘Of course, we have to practise. I told you that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t one run through be enough?’ I said, seeing whatever free time I might still possibly have these holidays slipping away. I almost added, ‘Don’t leave it too long, my social diary is almost full already’, but I said nothing of the sort. At the present time I couldn’t even go out and be social. Everything depended on the mirrors and what they did next. And, to tell the truth, after the dis-appointment of Troy, going out and being social had lost its appeal, big time.

  The third time

  I left Harry to begin altering the wooden chest and sloped back inside. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get out of my head what I had twice seen in the mirrors. I knew those two experiences were making me feel stressed and moody. And paralysed. If I’d been at the pool, I would have been treading water, getting nowhere. It’s true, the pictures of Laurie and May hadn’t been frightening in themselves. What was scary was the fact that I’d seen them. That they’d been there at all.

  I couldn’t just ignore what had happened and get on with life. And there was nothing worse than

  having to wait for another episode. Strange as it might sound, I wished there was something I could do to precipitate the appearance of another mirror image. If I left the mirrors to themselves they were only going to lie in wait for me, panicking me with

  their pictures when I least expected them, and least wanted them, to. If I could meet the mirrors half-way, so to speak (and don’t ask me how!), it

  might help me in some way to work out what on earth was happening in them and why.

  In the house I encountered Dad who had finally finished his exploration beneath the floorboards.

  ‘I couldn’t stand going down there,’ I said, immediately reminding myself about Harry’s proposed claustrophobic chest escape. I had to bite my tongue from mentioning it.

  Dad looked at me and said, ‘You don’t have to. However I did mean to ask you why you’re moping about the house and not gallivanting about as you usually do when you’re free of school? You haven’t fallen out with Emma and Rachel have you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, quickly. ‘We had plans but . . . but they haven’t worked out so far. You know how it goes.’ I tried to sound convincing but suspected Dad wasn’t convinced. He didn’t push the question though. I almost wished he had.

  ‘Best laid plans and all that,’ he said. ‘Yes, I understand. Well if you want something to occupy your unexpected leisure I have plenty of suggestions, none of which involve crawling under the house you’ll be pleased to hear.’

  ‘Thanks Dad,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got a biggish school project that needs doing and I’ve promised

  to help Harry with his escape plan.’

  ‘You don’t say!’ Dad looked and sounded amazed. ‘Well, that’s a turn up for the books.’

  ‘Don’t ask, it’s a long story,’ I said.

  ‘Speaking of Harry, we haven’t seen much of

  him lately either,’ said Dad. ‘He keeps promising us a gala performance of his straitjacket escape when he’s finished perfecting it.’

  ‘Don’t hold your breath. The straitjacket escape is out now Dad.’

  ‘Is it?’ Dad sounded disappointed. ‘He hasn’t given up on the talent quest has he?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ I reassured him. ‘He’s just taken a change of direction.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘A surprise,’ I said. ‘If I told you I’d have to kill you. You’ll see.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ said Dad. ‘I hope he wins. Imagine if he does. The prize money would come in really handy for the house.’

  Parents sometimes get the strangest notions.

  ‘What makes you think you’ll be in line for any of the cash if he wins, which he won’t,’ I said.

  ‘You’re starting to sound more like the old Athens,’ Dad laughed. ‘I reckon he’s got as good a chance as anybody, especially now you’re in on the act.’

  ‘He’ll be up against people from all over the country,’ I said.

  ‘Ah well, let’s wait and see,’ said Dad. ‘As long as he has fun taking part, that’s the important thing. And as for the money we’re all family aren’t we? Share and share alike.’

  ‘Yeah, right!’ I said.

  I left Dad to his delusory hope of getting a

  single cent out of Harry should he win the big prize (the only prize, in fact, if I remembered correctly, not fair on the runners-up it seemed to me) and carried on to my room. I had a vague idea of plonking myself on the end of my bed in front

  of my bedroom mirror and simply waiting for Laurie and Iris to reappear. Mad no doubt but since nothing else came to mind, that’s precisely what I did.

  While I waited I mulled over the strangeness of what I had seen so far. Two images, both of Laurie (as confirmed by May’s photograph) and therefore Iris as well (elementary, dear Watson) taken a distance apart in time because the protagonists had obviously aged between pictures.

  I visualised the photo of Laurie that May had shown me and then remembered something May had told me in passing. She’d said that Laurie and Iris had photos of themselves in the house. Lots of photos, photos of themselves at important stages of their lives. I hadn’t thought twice about this. It was what people did, except maybe May and Barry. (I hadn’t seen a single family photo in their house, had I?)

  Mum and Dad had photos everywhere, too: their wedding, our family holidays, birthdays and other special occasions. Even I had a few photos framed in my room, including one with Em and Rach and me at the beach. But now, waiting for something to happen in the mirror, this thought occurred to me. (Looking back it seemed so obvious - it will have already occurred to you, I’m sure - but sometimes I’m very slow off the mark.)

  The images of Iris and Laurie that I had seen had been static things. In my me
mory (a deceptive

  attribute, as May had pointed out) and in my imagination the couple had moved, looked into each other’s eyes and even blinked as they watched the sunlit sea from the hillside. I knew in reality that they hadn’t moved at all. The images

  I’d seen were like photographs, completely still. Photo snaps, taken in time but now out of time. Interesting, I thought, not that this speculation got me any further in understanding how or why they were turning up in the mirrors.

  While I’d been pondering this I had taken my eyes off the bedroom mirror. When I turned back to check on it, Laurie and Iris were back in the frame, so to speak.

  I was cold all over and felt myself starting to shiver even though my room was warm. All sound, however, seemed to have been completely sucked away. It was as if the house had become a silent vacuum. The world contracted into the silver, reflective pool of the mirror, the picture it showed

  me and a very faint, almost distant, ghostly reflection of the me who sat gazing into it.

  Iris and Laurie looked older still, older yet just as happy. This time they weren’t inside their version of my bedroom or on a hillside either but out of doors, in a garden, relaxing under a tree. Something about the shape of the tree was familiar. I recognised the way the trunk forked about a metre off the ground, one branch bending to the right while the other went straight up. Then I worked out which tree it was. Even though in the mirror-picture the tree was a lot younger it was the very same tree that still grew in our back yard. Its upper branches had overspread our washing line to

  such an extent that when birds settled on them their droppings sometimes plopped onto the sheets and shirts (the white laundry especially, what else?). Dad kept threatening to move either one or the other. ‘Shift the line,’ I’d heard Mum saying,

  ‘and spare the tree.’ And Dad replying, ‘That’s what I want to do but the pole’s embedded in a bloody great chunk of concrete that will probably