My Dear Sir,
Estate of Rupert David Angier Esquire, Dec'd
Pursuant to your recent enquiry to our client, I am instructed to advise you that all necessary arrangements for the disposal of the late Rupert David Angier's major chattels and appurtenances have been made, and that you need not embark on further enquiries as to their destination or enjoyment.
We anticipate instruction from our former client's estate as to the disposal of various minor pieces of property, and these shall be made available through public auction, whose date and place shall be announced in the usual gazettes.
In this we remain, Sir, yr. obedient servants, Kendal, Kendal & Owen
(Solicitors & Commissioners for Oaths)
I step forward to the footlights, and in the full glare of their light face you directly.
I say, "Look at my hands. There is nothing concealed within them."
I hold them up, raising my palms for you to see, spreading my fingers so as to prove nothing is gripped secretly between them. I now perform my last trick, and produce a bunch of faded paper flowers from the hands you know to be empty.
It is 1st September 1903, and I say that to all intents and purposes my own career ended with Angier's death. Although I was reasonably wealthy, I was a married man with children and had an expensive and complicated way of life to sustain. I could not walk away from my responsibilities, and so I was obliged to accept bookings so long as they were offered to me. In this way I did not fully retire, but the ambition that had driven me in the early years, the wish to amaze or baffle, the sheer delight of dreaming up the impossible, all these left me. I still had the technical ability to perform magic, my hands remained dexterous, and with Angier absent I was once again the only performer of The New Transported Man, but none of this was enough.
A great loneliness had descended on me, one the Pact yet prevents me from describing in full, except to say that I was the only friend I craved for myself. Yet I, of course, was the only friend I could not meet.
I touch on this as delicately as I can.
My life is full of secrets and contradictions I can never explain.
Whom did Sarah marry? Was it me, or was it me? I have two children, whom I adore. But are they mine to adore, really mine alone… or are they actually mine? How will I ever know, except by the cravings of instinct? Come to that, with which of me did Olive fall in love, and with whom did she move into the flat in Hornsey? It was not I who first made love to her, nor was it I who invited her to the flat, yet I took advantage of her presence, knowing that I too was doing the same.
Which of me was it who tried to expose Angier? Which of me first devised The New Transported Man, and which of me was the first to be transported?
I seem, even to myself, to be rambling, but every word here is coherent and precise. It is the essential dilemma of my existence.
Yesterday I was playing at a theatre in Balham, in south-west London. I performed the matinйe, then had two hours to wait before the evening show. As I often did at such times I went to my dressing room, pulled the curtains to and dimmed the lights, closed and locked the door, and went to sleep on the couch.
I awoke—
Did I wake at all? Was it a vision? A dream?
I awoke to find the spectral figure of Rupert Angier standing in my dressing room, and he was holding a long-bladed knife in both hands. Before I could move or call out he leapt at me, landing on the side of the couch and crawling quickly on top of me so that he was astride my chest and stomach. He raised the knife, and held it with the point of the blade resting above my heart.
"Prepare to die, Borden!" he said in his harsh and horrid whisper.
In this hellish vision it seemed to me that he barely weighed anything at all, that I could easily flip him away from me, but fear was weakening me. I brought my hands up and gripped his forearms, to try to stop him thrusting the knife fatally into me, but to my amazement I found that he was still wearing the greasy compound that prevented my getting a strong hold on him. The harder I tried, the more quickly my fingers slipped around his disgusting flesh. I was breathing his foul stink, the rank smell of the grave, of the boneyard.
I gasped in horror, because I felt the pointed blade pressing painfully against my breast.
"Now! Tell me, Borden! Which one are you? Which one?"
I could scarcely breathe, such was my fear, such was the terror that at any second the blade would thrust through my ribcage and puncture my heart.
"Tell me and I spare you!" The pressure of the knife increased.
"I don't know, Angier! I no longer know myself!"
And somehow that ended it, almost as soon as it had begun. His face was inches away from mine, and I saw him snarl with rage. His rancid breath flowed over me. The knife was starting to pierce my skin! Fear galvanized me into valour. I swung at him once, twice, fists across his face, battering him back from me. The deadly pressure on my heart softened. I sensed an advantage, and swung both my arms at his body, clenching my fists together. He yelled, swaying back from me. The knife lifted away. He was still on me, so I hit him again, then thrust up the side of my body to unseat him. To my immense relief he toppled away, releasing the knife as he fell to the floor. The deadly blade clattered against the wall and landed on the floor, as the spectral figure rolled across the floorboards.
He was quickly on his feet, looking chastened and wary, watching me in case I attacked again. I sat up on the couch, braced against another assault. He was the phantasm of ultimate terror, the spectre in death of my worst enemy in life.
I could see the lamp glinting through his semi-transparent body.
"Leave me alone," I croaked. "You are dead! You have no business with me!"
"Nor I with you, Borden. Killing you is no revenge. It should never have happened. Never!"
The ghost of Rupert Angier turned away from me, walked to the locked door, then passed bodily through it. Nothing of him remained, except a persistent trace of his hideous carrion stench.
The haunting had paralysed me with fear, and I was still sitting immobile on the couch when I heard beginners called. A few minutes later my dresser came to the room and tried to get in, and it was his insistent knocking that at last roused me from the couch.
I found Angier's knife on the floor of the dressing room, and I have it with me now. It is real. It was carried by a ghost.
Nothing makes sense. It hurts to breathe, to move; I still feel that pressing point of the knife against my heart. I am in the Hornsey flat, and I do not know what to do or who I really am.
Every word I have written here is true, and each one describes the reality of my life. My hands are empty, and I fix you with an honest look. This is how I have lived, and yet it reveals nothing.
I will go alone to the end.
PART THREE
Kate Angier
I was only five at the time, but there's no doubt in my mind that it all really happened. I know that memory can play tricks, especially at night, on a shocked and terrified child, and I know that people patch together memories from what they think happened, or what they wish had happened, or what other people later tell them had happened. All of this went on, and it has taken many years for me to piece together the reality.
It was cruel, violent, unexplained and almost certainly illegal. It wrecked the lives of most of the people involved. It has blighted my own life.
Now I can tell the story as I saw it take place, but tell it as an adult.
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My father is Lord Colderdale, the sixteenth of that name. Our family name is Angier, and my father's given names were Victor Edmund; my father is the son of Rupert Angier's only son Edward. Rupert Angier, The Great Danton, was therefore my great-grandfather, and the 14th Earl of Colderdale.