The smell of this discharge was soon assaulting the audience. I breathed it with the others, mentally reeling from thoughts of what it might contain. It had an unearthly, atomic quality, as if it represented the liberation of a force hitherto forbidden to man, and now, released, exhaled the stench of sheer energy rampant.
As more streaming arcs of electricity swooped about him, Angier moved to the tripod at the heart of the inferno, directly beneath the source. Once here he seemed safe. Apparently unable or unwilling to double back on themselves, the brilliant arcs of light snapped away from him, and with ferocious bangs impacted on the larger, outer slats. In moments, each of these had one arc reaching across to it, fizzing and spitting with restless animation, but contained in its place.
So these eight dazzling streamers formed a kind of canopy above the arena in which Angier stood, alone. The spotlight was suddenly extinguished, and all other stage lights had been dimmed. He was illuminated only by the light that fell on him from the incandescent discharge. He stood immobile, his good arm raised, his head barely an inch or so below the metal cylinder whence all the electricity emanated. He was saying something, a declaration to the audience, but one that was lost to me in the noisy commotion that scorched the air above him.
He lowered his arms, and for two or three seconds stood in silence, submitting to the awful spectacle he had made.
Then he vanished.
One moment Angier was there; the next he was not. His apparatus made a shrieking, tearing sound, and appeared to shake, but with his going the bright shards of energy instantly died. The tendrils fizzed and popped like small fireworks, and then were gone. The stage fell into darkness.
I was standing; without fully realizing it I had been standing for some time. I, and the rest of the audience, stood there aghast. The man had disappeared in front of our eyes, leaving no trace.
I heard a commotion in the aisle behind me, and with everyone else I turned to see what was happening. There were too many heads and bodies, I could not see clearly, some kind of motion in the darkened auditorium! Thankfully, the house lights came on, and one of the manned spotlights turned from its position high above the boxes, and its shaft of light picked out what was going on.
Angier was there!
Members of the theatre's staff were hurrying down the aisle towards him, and some of the audience were trying to get to him, but he was on his feet and pushing them away from him.
He was staggering down the aisle, heading back towards the stage.
I tried to recover from the surprise, and quickly made estimates. No more than a second or two could have elapsed between his disappearance from the stage, and his reappearance in the aisle. I glanced to and fro the stage, trying to work out the distance involved. My seat was at least sixty feet away from the front of the stage, and Angier had appeared well to the back of the aisle, close to one of the audience exits. He was a long way behind me, at least another forty feet.
Could he have dashed one hundred feet in a single second, while the darkness from the stage masked his movement?
It was then, and is now, a rhetorical question. Clearly he could not, without the use of magical techniques.
But which ones?
His progress along the aisle towards the stage briefly brought him level with me, where he stumbled on one of the steps before continuing onwards. I was certain he had not seen me, because self-evidently he had no eyes for anyone at all in the audience. His comportment was entirely that of a man wrapped in his own anguish; his face was tormented, his whole body moved as if racked with pain. He shambled like a drunk or an invalid, or a man finally exhausted with life. I saw the left arm he favoured hanging limply by his side, and the hand was smudged grey with flour, the red ink smeared into a dark mess. On the back of his jacket the burst of flour was still visible, still in the haphazard shape the volunteer had created when he slapped the bag against him, just a few seconds ago, and a hundred feet away.
We were all applauding, with many people cheering and whistling their approval, and as he neared the stage a second spotlight picked him out and tracked him up the ramp to the stage. He walked wearily to the centre of the stage, where at last he seemed to recover. Once more in the full glare of the stage lights he took his ovation, bowing to the audience, acknowledging them, blowing kisses, smiling and triumphant. I stood with the rest, marvelling at what I had seen.
Behind him, unobtrusively, the curtains were closing to conceal the apparatus.
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I did not know how the trick was done! I had seen it with my own eyes, and I had watched in the knowledge of how to watch a magician at work, and I had looked in all the places from which a magician traditionally misdirects his audience. I left the Hackney Empire in a boiling rage. I was angry that my best illusion had been copied; I was even angrier that it had been bettered. Worst of all, though, was the fact that I could not work out how it was done.
He was one man. He was in one place. He appeared in another. He could not have a double, or a stooge; equally he could not have travelled so quickly from one position to the other.
Jealousy made my rage worse. In a Flash, Angier's catchpenny title for his version of, his damnable improvement on, The New Transported Man, was unmistakably a major illusion, one which introduced a new standard into our often derided and usually misunderstood performing art. For this I had to admire him, no matter what my other feelings about him might be. Along with, I suspect, most of my fellow members of the audience, I felt that I had been privileged to witness the illusion for myself. As I walked away from the front of the theatre I passed the narrow alley that led down to the stage door, and I even momentarily wished it were possible for me to send up my card to Angier's dressing room, so that I might visit him there and congratulate him in person.
I suppressed these instincts. After so many years of bitter rivalry I could not allow one polished presentation of a stage illusion to make me humiliate myself before him.
I returned to my flat in Hornsey, where at that time I happened to be staying, and underwent a sleepless night, tossing restlessly beside Olive.
The next day I settled down to some hard and practical thinking about his version of my trick, to see what I could make of it.
I confess yet again: I do not know how he did it. I could not work out the secret when I saw the performance, and afterwards, no matter what principles of magic I applied, I could not think of the solution.
At the heart of the mystery were three, possibly four, of the six fundamental categories of illusion: he had made himself Disappear , he had then Produced himself elsewhere, somehow there seemed to be an element of Transposition , and all had been achieved in apparent Defiance of Natural Laws .
A disappearance on stage is relatively easy to arrange, placement of mirrors or half-mirrors, use of lighting, use of magician's "black art" or blinds, use of distraction, use of stage trapdoors, and so on. Production elsewhere is usually a question of planting in advance the object, or a close copy of it… or if it is a person, planting a convincing double of the person. Working these two effects together then produces a third; in their bafflement the audience believes it has seen natural laws defied.
Laws that I felt I had seen defied that evening in Hackney.
All my attempts to solve the mystery on conventional magical principles were unsuccessful, and although I thought and worked obsessively I did not come even close to a solution that satisfied me.