Authors: Christopher Priest
“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. My 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 outbursting 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.
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 realizing 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.
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,
almost like a flood of embarrassed compensation for the appalling scene I had witnessed.
Nor can I remember when my father walked out on us. 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 few of the circumstances. 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 the lives of his two young daughters. I also remember life afterwards without
him, a strong sense of his absence, a peace 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.
Clive Borden left the house the same night. I've no idea what happened to Nicky's body,
although I have always assumed that Borden took 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 realize 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 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 end 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.
My mother died when I was eighteen. Rosalie and I half-expected news of it to make our
father return eventually from 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 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 realized 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, and 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.
On that day, though, I wasn't going to let anything stop me. I had been preparing mentally
for some time. Once through the door I locked it from the inside (one of the changes I had
brought about), switched on the electric lights, and walked down to the cellar.
I looked immediately for the apparatus that had killed Nicky Borden, but, unsurprisingly,
it was no longer there. However, the circular pit was still in the centre of the cellar
floor, and I went over and inspected that. It appeared to have been constructed more
recently than the rest of the screed floor; it had clearly been excavated with a plan in
mind, because several steel ties were drilled into the concrete sides at regular
intervals, presumably to act as stays for the wooden bars of the apparatus. In the ceiling
overhead, directly above the centre of the pit, there was a large electrical junction box.
A thick cable led away to a voltage converter at the side of the cellar, but the box
itself had become dirty and rusty.
I noticed that there were numerous scorch marks on the ceiling radiating out from the box,
and although someone had put a coat of white emulsion paint over these they still showed
through clearly.
Apart from all this there was no sign that the apparatus had ever been in place.
I found the thing itself a few moments later, when I went to investigate the collection of
crates, cases and large mysterious objects stored neatly along most of the length of one
wall. I soon realized that this was where my great-grandfather's magic paraphernalia had
been stored, presumably after his death. Near the front, but otherwise stacked
unobtrusively, were two stoutly made wooden crates, each of them so heavy I was unable to
budge them, let alone get them out of the cellar on my own. Stencilled in black on one of
them, but greatly faded with age were routing names: “Denver, Chicago, Boston, Liverpool
(England)”. A Customs manifest was still stapled to the side, although it was so frayed
that it came off in my hand when I touched it. Holding it under the nearest light I saw
that someone had written in copperplate, "Contents — Scientific Instruments’. Metal hoops
had been attached on all four sides of both crates, to facilitate hoisting, and there were
obvious handholds all over the crates.
I tried to open the nearer of the two, fumbling along the edge of the lid to find some way
to force it open, when to my surprise the top swivelled upwards lightly, balanced within
in some way. I knew at once I had found the workings of the electrical apparatus I had
seen that night, but because it had been disassembled all menace was gone.
Attached to the inside of the lid were several large sheets of cartridge paper, still
uncurled and unyellowed, even in great age, and instructions had been written in a clear
but tiny and fastidious hand. I glanced over the first few:
1. Locate, check, and test local ground connection. If insufficient, do not proceed. See
(27) below for details of how to install, check, and test a ground connection. Always
check wiring colors; see chart attached.
2. [If not used in USA or Great Britain.] Locate, check, and test local electricity
supply. Use instrument located in Wallet 4.5.1 to determine nature, voltage, and cycle of
current. Refer to (15) below for settings to main transforming unit.
3. Test reliability of local electricity supply while assembling the apparatus. If there
is divergence of ±25V do not attempt to operate the apparatus.
4. When handling components, always wear the protective gloves located in Wallet 3.19.1
(spares in 3.19.2).
And so on, an exhaustive checklist of assembly instructions, many of them using technical
or scientific words and phrases. (I have since arranged for a copy to be made, which I
keep in the house.) The whole list was signed with the initials “F.K.A.”.
Inside the lid of the second crate was a similar list of instructions, these dealing with
safely disconnecting the apparatus, dismantling it and stowing the components inside the
crates in their correct places.
It was at this moment that it began to dawn on me who my great-grandfather had actually
been. What I mean by this is the sense of what he had done, what he had been capable of,
what he had achieved in his life. Until then he was just an ancestor, Grandpa who had his
stuff about the house. It was my first glimpse of the person he might have been. These
crates, with their meticulous instructions, had been his and the instructions had been
written by or more likely for him. I stood there for a long time, imagining him unpacking
the apparatus with his assistants, racing against the clock to get the thing set up in
time for the first performance. I still knew almost nothing about him, but at last I had
an insight into what he did, and a little of how he did it.
(Later in the year, I sorted through the rest of his stuff and this too helped me sense
what he was like. The room that had been his study was full of neatly filed papers:
correspondence, bills, magazines, booking forms, travel documents, playbills, theatre
programmes. A large part of his life was filed away there, and there was more in the
cellar, costumes and paraphernalia from his shows. Most of the costumes had fallen to bits
with old age, and I threw them out, but the cabinet illusions were in working or
repairable condition, and because I needed the money I sold the best examples to magic
collectors. I also disposed of Rupert Angier's collection of magic books. From the people
who came to buy, I learnt that much of his material was valuable, but only in cash terms.
Little of it had more than curiosity value to modern magicians. Most of the illusions The
Great Danton performed were of an everyday variety, and to the expert or collector they
contained no surprises. I did not sell the electrical apparatus, and it is still down in
the cellar in its crates.)
By some means I had not planned, going down into the cellar put my childish fears of it
behind me. Perhaps it was as simple as the fact that in the intervening years I had grown
into an adult, or in the absence of the rest of the family had become the effective head
of the household. Whatever the reason, when I emerged from the old brown door, locking it
behind me, I believed I had thrown off something unwelcome that had dogged my life until
then.
It was not enough, though. Nothing could excuse the fact that I had seen a small boy
cruelly murdered that night, and by my own father.
This secret has wormed itself into my life, indirectly influencing everything I do,
inhibiting me emotionally and immobilizing me socially. I am isolated here. I rarely make
friends, I want no lovers, a career does not interest me. Since Rosalie moved out to get
married I have lived here alone, as much a victim as my parents were.
I want to distance myself from the madness that the feud has brought to my family in the
past, but as I grow older I believe more strongly the only way out is to face up to it. I
cannot get on with my life until I understand how and why Nicky Borden died.
His death nags at me. The obsession would end if I knew more about the boy, and what
really happened to him that night. As I have learned about my family's past, I have
learned inevitably about the Bordens. I traced you, Andrew, because I think you and I are
the key to the whole thing — you are the sole surviving Borden, while I am to all intents
the last living Angier.
Against all logic, I know Nicky Borden was
you
, Andrew, and that somehow you survived that ordeal.