The Houdini Effect Read online

  The Houdini Effect

  The Houdini Effect

  Bill Nagelkerke

  This e Book edition first published in 2016 by Bill Nagelkerke

  Copyright 2016 Bill Nagelkerke

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted. This book is copyright. All rights reserved. Except for the purposes of fair reviewing, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the copyright owner and the publisher of the book.

  (AUTHOR'S WARNING: I’m not only a word freak but also a words-in-parentheses freak! You can skip the Definitions below and the Epigraph on the next page if you want to.)

  Definitions

  effect, noun

  1. a direct result

  2. a technique or device used to create an

  impression

  effect, verb

  to bring about, achieve or cause to

  happen

  Epigraph

  An epigraph is a quotation at the beginning of a book related to its theme. Here’s mine:

  "He is crying, holding his dear wife in his arms, begging her not to abandon him . . . for she is wasting away, dying from the disease."

  From Alkestis by Euripides.

  (Alkestis is the name of an ancient Greek play written by an ancient Greek called Euripides. Our school’s classics teacher, once I told her a little bit about the story I was writing - she assumed it was fiction and I didn’t correct her - gave me the above quotation.

  ‘Athens dear,’ she said, ‘I think you’ll find it absolutely fitting.’

  If you get to the end of my book you’ll find out why Ms Kidd was right. The words do make a perfect - if seriously miserable - epigraph.

  Talking about serious and miserable, now it’s time for the prologue! It took me ages to write.)

  PROLOGUE

  Through a glass darkly

  There is an old man in a room.

  His bed is hard up against one wall. There is a writing desk opposite the large sliding door that opens into a tiny, tidy garden. The room is not exactly spartan (means, ‘pretty basic’. Another reference to Ancient Greece) but it lacks the presence of personal knick-knacks. It’s a cold, clinical kind of room, the sort of place where you might expect things to come to an end rather than begin.

  On the desk rests a mirror. It stands on the desk, angled against the wall, but it also stands out in a different way. Somehow it does not fit the room. It doesn’t belong there. It’s too ornate for its surroundings. Just like the man, the mirror is old. Unlike him it is shaped in elaborate curves and its edges are bevelled and diamante (meaning, imitation diamonds). Its surface glimmers, free from dust. This mirror has been well looked after.

  The old man sits at the desk staring into the mirror. Not only can he see his own reflection but also that of the garden on the far side of the sliding door behind him. He sees through, rather than truly seeing those things. His mind is elsewhere.

  With hands that tremble he pulls open a drawer immediately beneath the desktop and lifts out a heavy photo album. He turns the cover and then the pages, one by one. He stops at a certain picture. He tilts the album up by about forty-five degrees so that it mirrors the mirror, bends his head in order to study that photo in detail.

  Anyone watching would think his eyesight is so bad that he can’t bring the image into focus until it is just centimetres from his eyes, and until he has looked at it for a long, long time. This isn’t so. He can see the picture clearly enough. It’s of a wedding. His and Iris’s wedding.

  ‘Iris,’ he whispers to the photograph. ‘You promised. Why is it taking you so long?’

  With some difficulty, he turns the album away from himself so that the photo faces its reflection in the mirror.

  Despite appearances, the old man’s mind is still sharp and clear.

  He knows clearly that without images (such as those taken by a camera) or reflections (like those provided by mirrors) you would never in a whole lifetime be able to see yourself, not clearly. Yet it’s always been something of a mystery and a paradox to him that only photos show you the way others see you. That’s how Iris saw him everyday, and that’s how he saw Iris. Photos have the power to surprise and perturb the person photographed. That’s me, you think, but it’s not the person I see everyday in the mirror.

  (When you look into a mirror, which surely is more often than you look at a photograph of yourself, you see yourself reversed. So what is truer, a photo self or a mirror self?)

  The old man had once discovered that if he held a photograph in front of a mirror he was able to turn his photo self back into his mirror self. Two truths colliding, like atoms. In the photo, he and Iris, just married, are seen through the eyes of

  other people but when the old man holds their photo up to the glass the reflection of their photo

  reverses them, turns them back into the individuals they themselves knew best. And, after all, theirs was a house of mirrors as much as of photos.

  ‘Look at us,’ he says. ‘Won’t you keep your promise now? Don’t keep me waiting any longer.’

  PART ONE

  The Beginning

  (By this I mean the real beginning of the story. The Prologue - which was a sort of beginning - was really difficult to write. As I said, it took ages. I wanted to use a different tone to create the right atmosphere. Hopefully I succeeded. But now I can relax and start sounding more like the real me.)

  Haunting

  I’ll begin with a thought I scribbled down when I was mulling over what had happened. I thought it might be the seed for a future story, perhaps even the first line. But, of course, it fits this story perfectly, now that this story has become a story.

  I think that everybody is, in the end, haunted by mirrors and what they have seen reflected in them.

  Quite a nice sentence, if I say so myself. (I hope you’ll agree.)

  Magicians in action

  Have you ever seen magicians in action? Sometimes they are silent, like the actors you see in really old movies, miming to mood music. Other times they talk, sometimes far too much. (I

  talk a lot too but mainly in my head and in my writing.) Magicians deliver what Harry calls

  patter. Often this patter is full of jokes, one-liners,

  mostly really dumb ones. They are meant to amuse

  the audience by their very badness but, more

  importantly, to distract them.

  Distraction is the lifeblood of magicians.

  Harry knows quite a lot of jokes that involve puns on magic and magicians. Here are two random examples:

  When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar. (A jar, get it? Yes, I know, really dumb.)

  What did it say on the magician’s van? Caution, this van may turn into a driveway. (Ha, ha! Hilarious? No, not very.)

  When is a mirror not a mirror? When it shows still pictures, not moving reflections.

  OKAY, this last one is not a joke, and I can count. It’s not meant to be funny and it’s not anything of Harry’s. It’s all mine, and it’s what this story is ultimately about.

  Chaos theory

  From the time we moved into our ‘upsized accommodation’ (at first I refused to call it a house, much less a home) we were living in a state of semi-chaos, a state that was not helped by the mirrors and other sundry items.

  If you’ve studied mathematics, as Harry and I have at school, and taken any notice at all of what the teachers have taught you, you will know that Chaos Theory tries to find patterns in things that seem random. Chaos Theory, despite sounding the opposite of what it means, tries to organize the world into patterns and
predictability.

  I’m a great believer in Chaos Theory. Outwardly I am the least chaotic person I know. My visible life is lived best when it’s allowed to be

  lived neatly and orderly. Tidy, full of obvious,

  predictable patterns, like my well filled, organized bookshelves, that’s me. Outward life is what a scene in a mirror reflects when you gaze into one - utterly unsurprising, no matter that it’s all back-to-front.

  My inner, literary, writing life on the other hand tends to conform to Chaos Theory. I’d always believed, though, that I’d be able to keep the two lives separate. That theory fell a-part this year, when I was fourteen, going on fifteen. (This line is adapted from one in a famous cult film. Can you name it? Answer: The sound of music, 1965)

  Love (as well as literature) confirms Chaos Theory

  You could say I am a (recent) student of love. Not that I have ever been I love - yet. I hold fast to a fearsome hope, if not any immediate expectation, that one day it will happen. I had what you could call a strong attraction to a certain person whom I shall, in due course, name in my narrative, but I have a nasty suspicion that love is neither neat nor orderly. My parents are prime examples of this. They seem to love one another but, at the same time, appear to live almost separate lives. Where is the order in that I ask you?

  Nowhere.

  What magicians say

  Magicians say that the hand is quicker than the eye. That is so not true. The eye is much, much faster. Therefore magicians are liars as well as

  lame-joke jokers. You cannot believe anything

  they say. You cannot believe anything they do. Clearly I am not in a position to complain. I am an aspiring writer and writers are as bad, if not worse, liars than magicians. (Can you believe anything I’ve said so far? Of course you can/can’t.)

  So why, knowing these facts, am I always being sucked in by my brother the magician? Or as he would say, with added emphasis, ‘Sucked in badly.’

  Sigh.

  You tell me.

  Harry’s séance

  You could argue that this story of mine began here, at the séance; that it got the ball rolling. I guess that in some strange way I don’t yet understand and probably never will, it did.

  Here’s the scene. I’m sitting at a table. In the dark. It’s a day in September. The southern hemisphere spring (the hemisphere in which I dwell) has sprung, and it’s less than a month to Halloween. Dad has been buying cheap, bulk-bin sweets for the trick-and-treaters and hiding the notices Mum keeps printing off the (would you believe it!?) police website, saying T&Ts aren’t welcome at our door.

  Outside it is unexpectedly light, a hint that daylight saving is just round the corner. But inside, by comparison, it’s as dark as dark. That’s because the drapes have been drawn. Only a thin, accidental gap where they meet lets in a paper-shred strip of thin, pale light.

  They are raggedy-at-the-edges but still

  fulsomely thick, old-fashioned drapes, patterned with fat flowers. (I know, prose so purple so you could wrap a few Roman emperors up in it but who cares, I like it!) They came with the house. A lot of things came with the house, like the dark-varnished wood panelling that encoffins us (not a real word but, you guessed it, I like it too), and the mirrors. To make matters darker, the room with the table is on the south side of the house so at this time of day the sun doesn’t get anywhere near it, not even if the drapes are open at their fullest. A fusty, decaying smell seems to emanate from the chimney, but maybe I’m imagining that.

  Anyway, to get to the point (I admit, it can often take me a while) it’s the perfect room for a séance, for calling up the dead or the may-quite-likely-be-dead. The table at which we are sitting (no surprises, it also came with the house) is a smallish, one-legged round one. On one side sit I while, just an arm’s length away sits my younger brother Harry. How crazy is this? I, the older sibling by three years, am doing exactly what my eleven-year old brother is telling me to do. At times like this, when he is at his impressive best, I tend to forget he is a magician (in training) and I forget he is a liar (no longer in training, but an expert).

  ‘Don’t talk,’ he commands me, enjoying the power trip he is on. I fall silent.

  ‘Shut your eyes,’ My eyelids close tight. Well, for the time being. Long ago I resolved never to make promises to a magician, no matter how impressive. (The magician, not the promises.)

  Of course, I don’t know if Harry’s eyes are

  closed or not, but I can sense that he is con-

  centrating hard. Eventually, as the waiting becomes too prolonged (and tedious) and hoping he won’t notice, I open one of my eyelids a fraction. I can barely glimpse Harry in the self-imposed gloom. Even so, I am able to sense, if not properly see, his tightly focused frown as he does his damnedest to conjure up the ghost of the grumpy old man who used to live here. (More about him soon.)

  Reluctantly, I shut out the light once more. Harry is the only one of our family who has ever shown signs of being superstitious yet, despite my best intentions, I find that I do not want to spoil his spell. Perhaps I too am susceptible to supernatural suggestion. (The hand may not be quicker than the eye but the mind is far too easily taken-over by the imagination. Good for a writer - when writing - but not so good for a mainly sceptical and rather reluctant guest at a séance organized by a magician.)

  I long to ask Harry if he has made a ‘connection’ yet but I remain silent. From what Harry has told me, I know that any sound I make might break the link he is forging with the spirit of the old man. For some reason Harry believes that something - possibly an ‘essence’ - of Laurence Harvey Laurison came with the house along with all the other fittings and furniture. To begin with I am sceptical. Very. That is changing. I can’t help it. My eyelids flick open again. I can’t help but shiver either. What’s happening?

  I shift slightly on the hard, bum-uncomfortable chair. In the gloom I can just make out Harry, both

  his eyes wide open, staring blankly ahead of him.

  He must be able to see that I am disobeying the

  rules but, if he does, he doesn’t comment or criticize. Is he in a trance? He seems to be seeing something or is it someone? What, or who, is it?

  The single sliver of light from the crack in the drape just happens to reflect in the mirror behind me. The light bounces back onto Harry opposite, enough for me to see his enlarged pupils and the narrow seas of white surrounding them. Harry suddenly groans. It doesn’t sound like Harry at all. It sounds . . . well, it sounds exactly like the sort of groan a very old, possibly very grumpy, man might make. An old, grumpy man in pain.

  I jerk with shock. My chair leg seems to be scraping back over the wooden floor. Except it’s not my chair. Harry’s? Of course it is. It has to be his, there’s no other chair at the table. But wait. It isn’t a chair at all, but the stork-leg of the table that moved. Is still moving. On no, now the whole table is convulsing!

  Is it Lawrence Harvey Laurison, Laurie for short, doing this? The thing is, we don’t know if Laurie is dead or alive. None of us knows for sure, neither our neighbours, May and Barry, who knew Laurie, nor Harry who is trying to call him up.

  Before we started this I said to Harry (with heavy irony), ‘Would it not make all the difference in the world to the success or otherwise of the séance if you knew whether or not Laurie was actually dead?’

  Harry looked at me when I said that. He doesn’t much like it when I use long words and/or speak in a formal, writerly way. Likewise, irony pisses him off big time. (Even more ironic is the fact that he’s

  unlikely to know that I’m using a technique called

  irony, and what irony is exactly.) Pissing off a

  mostly super-confident younger brother is an excellent achievement.

  Furthermore, my syntax (that means ‘sentence structure’) forces Harry to think about what I might or might not mean and therefore it slows him down, a helpful technique whenever I need an advantage over him.

  This
particular question, though, fell flat. When Harry eventually deciphered what I was asking him, he declared it wasn’t important.

  ‘Athens, it’s his house spirit I want to attract,’ he explained, in his most annoyingly pompous voice. ‘The part that stayed in the house. I thought you’d understand that.’ (Naturally, Harry’s accidental use of irony manages to piss me off much, much more than my deliberate use does him.)

  House spirit

  House spirit? Come on! Who are you fooling? Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? Not me, that’s for sure. Hardly surprising though especially if, as I imagine was the case, Harry made up the term on the spot.

  I try to remember if Harry has ever shown a previous interest in calling up the dead, or ‘house spirits’, or whatever he wants to call them. I don’t believe so. It’s only ever been magic tricks and, more recently, escapology that have been his passion. Harry’s greatest hero is the magician and escape-meister, Harry Houdini. Having said that, I do remember Harry once telling me that Houdini

  was also into all this spirit-searching stuff. I’m not

  sure, however, if holding a séance will go down

  very well in a talent quest, assuming that is why Harry is trying this. I should have asked him, I suppose. More about the talent quest later. But, for now, back to the séance.