Shamanka (18 page)

She opened the box and helped the bewildered Christa back onto her feet. She'd been seconds from death, and when she learnt that Candy had plotted for her to die under John's sword, she collapsed. The Dark Prince was aghast. Why would Candy do such an evil thing to her own sister?

“She saw Sam's blonde streak,” Kitty told him. “She knows you're the father, John.”

Christa, somewhat delirious, began to panic. “We have to convince Candy that he isn't or she'll kill herself!”

It might seem odd that Christa was so concerned about her sister's welfare after what she'd just done. Plotting to kill someone in cold blood is bad enough; tricking your fiancé into doing the dirty deed for you is unspeakable. Even so, Christa felt she was to blame, despite John insisting it was all his fault. Seeing her in such distress and not knowing what to do, he asked Kitty for help.

Kitty's plan was bizarre, but there was a chance it might work. She fetched red ink, black ink and an onion; props they would use to trick Candy into believing John had killed Christa. There was no time to explain the logic behind it; they just had to follow her instructions. Christa was to climb back into the box and play dead. John was to rehearse the lines he would say to Candy. Meanwhile, Kitty busied herself with the details necessary to complete the illusion.

When Candy returned, she found John Tabuh slumped over the box, grieving for his fiancée.

“I have killed Candy, the only girl I have ever loved!”

Red-eyed and weeping (thanks to Kitty's peeled onion), John wondered aloud how the trick had gone so fatally wrong. Then, in a dramatic gesture, he threatened to fall on his sword, insisting that life wasn't worth living now his beloved Candy was dead.

Delighted that she meant so much to him after all, Candy wrestled the sword away, flung her arms around him and confessed to the swap. “Darling, it's
Christa
inside the box, not me!”

John pretended to be greatly surprised, peered inside the box and scratched his head, his eyes darting from the “dead” twin to the live one. Faking confusion, he raised the lid just enough for Candy to see Christa's bleeding “corpse” (clever use of red ink).

Now John ranted about having blood on his hands. What had he done, he asked Candy, that was so unforgivable, she'd tricked him into killing his own wardrobe mistress?

At the mention of the word “mistress” – a word Kitty had told John to stress – Candy bellowed: “
Mistress?
I'll say she was your mistress! You are the father of her brat!” And she yanked off Sam's bonnet to expose the blonde streak – only to find that it had gone! Not for a second did she suspect that the streak had been disguised with black ink.

“The baby has no blonde streak! You're paranoid – mad!” Kitty shouted with such conviction, Candy began to wonder if she
had
imagined the whole affair. Now she must pretend the whole thing was a tragic accident or John would call off the wedding.

“Poor Christa!” she cried, her body wracked with fake sobs. “I never asked her to swap places, she insisted! She wanted me to have those shoes; that's the kind of sweet girl she was. I told her, if you must do it, be sure to lie in the box with your head at the
safe
end.”

Kitty wanted to scream “Liar!” but she bit her tongue. If Candy knew she'd overheard, she'd also know that Kitty would have rushed straight to tell John. He'd have stopped the trick and Christa would still be alive. Candy had to believe her sister was dead. To bang the point home and to make herself look unbiased, Kitty accused them
both
of murder and said she was going to the police.

John stood in Kitty's way – and a fine piece of acting it was – saying he'd rather die than go to prison. Again he threatened to fall on his sword. This time he actually nicked his chin on the blade, whereupon Kitty rushed to his aid with a plaster and withdrew her threat. As both women fought to tend the bleeding patient, John announced his master stroke – the twist in the illusion that would allow him to marry Christa and leave the country without Candy ever knowing. All this so that he wouldn't break his fiancée's heart.

There was, he claimed, an ancient chant that his father had used to resurrect Lola. It didn't work on people, but he believed there was another chant that did. He'd been given a list of mystics, one of whom must know this chant. With that in mind, John planned to travel the world with Christa's mummified body in the magic box until he found someone to resurrect her. As soon as she'd come back to life, he'd come home and marry Candy. There was only one condition; she must never tell anyone how Christa died, or there could be no happy outcome.

Although John made it sound as if resurrecting Christa was simply a matter of time, Candy wasn't convinced. But he kept stressing that he was putting himself out to get her off a murder trial and that Christa wouldn't be lying dead if Candy hadn't made her feel obliged to swap places for the sake of a pair of shoes.

Rather than upsetting him by saying, “What if you fail?” she wailed, “Can I come too?”

He wouldn't hear of it. “The world is a dangerous place,” he said. “I would never forgive myself if anything happened to you.”

John warned that he might be gone for years and that if he didn't return, it wasn't for want of love; he'd simply succumbed to a tropical disease, drowned in a swamp or been eaten by a tiger. Seeing her face fall, he added hastily that, for all he knew, the chap who knew the chant might live nearby – in Watford, perhaps – in which case they'd be married by Christmas. He then asked Kitty to look after Sam until he'd tracked down Bingo Hall, to whom he would return the baby – Bingo was the father after all. Naturally Kitty agreed, as it was her idea to say this in the first place. All that remained was for John to kiss Lola and Candy goodbye.

“But where shall I go?” Candy cried. “I can't stay here with the ghost of my sister!” She was afraid it would haunt her, perhaps.

“Move into Christa's flat at the weekend,” said John. “Until then, stay here. Kitty will keep the ghost away while you grieve.”

Grieve? Candy Khaan's heart was hardly bleeding for her sister; she stuck her tongue out behind her hand, painted on her most alluring smile and begged John not to go; what would she do for
money
? There was no reply. The Dark Prince had vanished in a puff of smoke.

And so had his magic box.

Using three cups and three coloured balls, the masked magician makes the balls pass through the solid bottoms of cups, jump from cup to cup, disappear from the cup and then reappear. How?

THE SECRET

There are many variations of this illusion. This one uses sleight of hand.

1. A ball is shown to be transferred from the right to the left hand, whilst really, it is retained in the right by finger-palming.

2. A cup is then lifted to show there is nothing underneath it and, when it is put down, the finger-palmed ball is released under the cup.

3. The ball is now shown to have vanished from the left hand and the cup is lifted to show the ball has “travelled” there.

“O
h! So my father kissed Candy goodbye but he never kissed me,” sulks Sam, ignoring the enormity of what she's just been told and fixating – as people do – on the smallest of details.

“He wanted to kiss you,” insists Kitty, “but we'd just managed to convince Candy that you weren't his booby. A display of affection towards you would have ruined our illusion.”

“So where did Mum and Dad go?”

Back to Christa's flat in St Peter's Square. Candy had been told that John had gone there to hunt for Bingo Hall's address. In reality, John and Christa had gone to the flat for two reasons:

1. To make travel plans: Christa had hastily copied down the names on the witch doctor's list into a new notebook in case the tropical climate faded the ink and made it illegible. The original notebook was stored in a trunk in the attic, safely hidden in the goatskin pouch. Kitty had promised to come to the flat with further items necessary for their journey abroad, her excuse to Candy being that she'd gone there to mummify Christa.

2. To get married: the plan was to slip away and get married in secret. They would then sneak back to the warehouse, collect Sam and the trunk from Kitty, and leave the country to complete John's mission. They would then return to his father and settle down as a family until the old man died, whereupon John would take over as witch doctor.

Those were their plans. They left the flat to get married, leaving Candy to move in as John had told her to. But then things went horribly wrong. All John and Christa's intentions were destroyed by the warehouse fire.

To be fair to Aunt Candy, when she'd left the flat in St Peter's Square that morning, she had no intention of starting an inferno. She'd been drinking, and the more she drank, the more it seemed like a good idea to visit Kitty to see if Bingo Hall had taken his brat or if John had been in touch. Picture this scene at the warehouse: Sam is asleep in the crib, tired after her morning bath. Lola is washing nappies. Kitty is standing on the top rung of a ladder with a blowtorch, putting the finishing touches to the Egyptian temple she's constructing.

It's a magnificent work of art – over twenty feet high and hung with elaborate curtains, only they're drooping because the heavy fabric has split one of the curtain rings. As Kitty doesn't have a spare ring, she'll have to solder the broken one together. It'll take forever to take the curtains down, so she decides to fix the ring with her blowtorch while they're still hanging.

We've all done it, haven't we? Taken the shortcut. Fine if you've just burnt the toast; you can scrape the cinders off and no harm's done. But what if you're up a ladder with a blowtorch and a drunken contortionist arrives unannounced, demanding to know if her dead sister's brat has been claimed?

What if that same contortionist looks in the crib, sees the blonde streak in the baby's hair, now that the ink's washed out, and realizes she's been tricked? What if she demands to know the truth and rocks the ladder so violently, the blowtorch sets the curtains on fire?