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 doppelgдnger , 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.
I am trying to put as good a face as possible on the matter, but in the deepest recess of my heart I am harbouring a secret fear. In short, it is that my ill health might mean I shall never again be able to perform. After Borden's attack on me I have become a semi-invalid.