Authors: Christopher Priest
I am a tired but happy man.
Sometimes people notice my appearance and comment in a well-intended way on how unwell I
might be. I am brave about this.
1st January 1903
So I reach the year in which Rupert Angier is to forsake this life. I have not yet chosen
an exact date for my demise, but it will not be until well after the conclusion of my
American tour.
We depart from Liverpool for New York three weeks from tomorrow, and shall be away until
April. The problem of disposal of prestige materials has only partially been solved, but
helping to alleviate it is the fact that I shall be performing In a Flash on average only
once a week. If necessary I shall do what I did before, but Wilson declares that he has
found a solution. Whatever the case, the show will go on.
Julia and the children will be with me during what will no doubt later become known as my
farewell tour.
30th April 1903
I have told Unwin to continue accepting bookings through to the end of the year, and for
the early months of 1904. However, I shall be dead by the end of September. Probably it
will occur on Saturday, 19th September.
15th May 1903
In Lowestoft
After the dizzy experiences of New York, Washington DC, Baltimore, Richmond, St Louis,
Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles… I am in Lowestoft, Suffolk. In the USA I
might make my fortune, but in places like the Pavilion Theatre in Lowestoft I earn my
living.
I open tomorrow for a week.
20th May 1903
I have cancelled both my performances tonight, tomorrow's are in jeopardy, and as I draft
these words I am anxiously awaiting Julia's arrival.
I am a fool, a damned, bloody
fool
!
Last night, second performance, halfway through. (I can barely bring myself to set this
down in writing.) I have recently added a new card trick to my repertoire. In this, a
member of the audience is invited up to the stage. He takes a card and writes his name on
the face of it. I tear off a corner of the card, and give it to the volunteer to hold. The
rest of the card is placed inside a paper envelope, which is ignited. When the flames have
gone out I produce a large orange. I cut it in half and it is found to contain the signed
card, and the torn-off corner still of course fits.
Last night my volunteer was what I thought must be a local man; he was tall and burly, had
a florid complexion, and when he spoke I heard a Suffolk accent. I had spotted him earlier
in the show, sitting in the centre of the front row, and as soon as I noticed his amiable,
unintelligent face I had picked him out as a likely volunteer. He did in fact offer
himself as soon as I called for someone to come up on stage, something which should have
alerted me to likely trouble. However, while I was doing the trick he was the perfect
foil, even drawing a laugh or two from the audience with his homely sense of humour and
commonplace observations. (“Take a card,” said I. “What, you want me to take it home,
sor?” said the man, all wide-eyed and seemingly eager to please.)
How could I not have guessed it was Borden?! He even gave me a clue, because the name he
wrote on the playing card was
Alf Redbone
, a transparent near-anagram, yet in my preoccupations I took it to be his real name.
With the card trick completed I shook his hand, thanked him by name, and added my applause
to that of the audience as he was led by Hester, my present female assistant, towards the
stalls ramp.
I did not notice that Redbone's seat was still empty a few minutes later, as I moved
towards the start of In a Flash.
In the tensions leading up to this performance, his absence registered only at the back of
my mind; I knew there was something wrong, but because of the moment I could not think
exactly what it might be. As the current started to flow through the Tesla apparatus, and
the long tendrils of high-voltage discharge snaked around me, and the anticipation from
the audience was at its greatest, I noticed his absence at last. The significance of it
came at me like a thunderbolt.
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 materialize 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 up 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
materialization. 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. Now duty
and confusion brought her out of her place in the wings.
“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 strain 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 touch 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 told me he had seen nothing untoward up there. He 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 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 move was a strain, and the cough felt
explosively coiled in my chest, ready to burst out again 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 great 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 realized I had little strength in me.
Reluctantly, I have cancelled both of tonight's performances, and while Wilson has been at
the theatre I have penned this account of what happened.
22nd May 1903
In London
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.