The Houdini Effect (18 page)

And it was true, I did.

‘What?’

‘
Listen. When you said what
you did about the mirrors, did you have any particular reason for
saying it?’

Harry looked completely blank. Trust him to
have forgotten already but I suppose it was some time ago and he
didn’t have the same strong reason as I had for remembering.

‘
Mirrors? Boy, you do have
a fixation on them don’t you? What did I say about them, if
anything?

Remind me.’

So I reminded him although I suspected that
there wasn’t much point.

‘
You said, and I quote,
“Isn’t it funny that we’ve been living with someone else’s mirrors
ever since we moved in here?”’

I could almost see the mice (or maybe the
rats) turning the clockwork inside Harry’s head as he struggled to
recall. ‘Maybe I did say that, I just don’t remember,’ he said.
‘Honest. It might have been one of those brilliant ideas that
suddenly pop

into my head, you know? It’s just there and
I have to say it. Why does it matter now?’

‘
It doesn’t,’ I told
him.

‘
Why’re you asking me then,
if it’s not important?’

How could I come right out
and tell him I wanted to know if he’d seen anything in the mirrors,
the same as I had? Chances were he wouldn’t tell me even if he had.
After all, I wasn’t letting the cat out of the bag either. It had
occurred to me that Harry’s séance may have been

prompted by Harry seeing Laurie and Iris in
a mirror, or that the séance itself had somehow caused the
sightings in the first place. But now I dismissed both those ideas.
Harry was pretty hopeless at keeping secrets other than magical

ones so I felt sure he
would have dropped some small suggestion of a hint if he’d glimpsed
Laurie and Iris.

And the séance had been an elaborate trick,
nothing more than that.

‘
Just forget I asked,’ I
said.

‘
I will,’ said
Harry.

He shook his head as if in
despair at my mad-

ness and left the room. I wished I could
walk away from my predicament so easily.

Not long afterwards
everything went from bad to worse. And that’s when I began to
realise that there was no way I was going to be able to hold myself
together for much longer.

PART THREE

(The beginning of) The End

(I know.
Another
beginning.)

Escapes and Orbits

(DEEP THOUGHT # . . . Oops, I’ve lost count.
Never mind.)

I don’t know what happened to change the
pattern but something did. Something that had been ‘merely’
disturbing, unnerving and inexplicable suddenly became really,
really frightening - and still inexplicable.

I was drifting off to
sleep thinking about the day, Harry’s proposition (about which I
had not yet made a firm decision. Harry had gone to bed, fuming . .
.), and the picture/image/photo - however best to describe it - of
Mitchell’s birthday party. I was again also thinking about Barry
and May, Mum and Dad, Iris and Laurie, me and . . . Troy (as
if!).

Pairings of people, so many different
variations of pairs but curiously all intent, in some way or
another, on escaping. That idea had not occurred to me before,
although Harry had said something similar earlier on.

Harry escaped through
magic and me through words. May and Barry escaped each other
through distance and silence. Dad and Mum escaped through their
different jobs and interests. Our parents weren’t escaping from
each other though, I was sure of that, and not from Harry or me
either but maybe just from becoming bored, from not

having anything diverting
to do. What was Troy escaping from, I wondered? Was the boy I’d
thought of as ‘polite’ actually a little disturbed (hence the
escape into backward sentences and the enthusiasm for palindromes)
or was he simply a tad nerdy? And why had he rung me to talk about
palindromes in the first place? What had made him think I’d be
interested in that sort of discussion? I wished I’d asked him in my
letter.

Oh so many questions with no answers
forthcoming!

Above me, on the ceiling, I’d stuck
fluorescent stars and planets orbiting my central, lampshade sun.
Very childish I know but it’s nice to take a remnant of childhood
with you wherever you go. These stick-on stars had travelled with
me to every house I’d lived in. Their original stickiness was long
gone. Double-sided, double-strength tape now fixed those heavenly
orbs firmly to their artificial firmament.

I’d already turned the sun off and had only
my halogen desk lamp switched on. This wasn’t bright enough to dull
the faintly green, ghostly tinge of my luminous starry ceiling. My
thought pattern continued to run as follows: if planets and their
orbits were people then Mum and Dad would have mostly separate
orbits but ones that occasionally intersected, like in a standard
Venn diagram. I suspected that often Harry and I were at the
intersection of their orbits but at other times I was also sure
that the olds liked to meet up there just for the sake of meeting.
They weren’t always trying to stray away from each other, not as it
might have seemed to someone watching their orbits from the
outside, as it were.

Barry and May’s orbits, on the other hand,
were

totally apart. The more I thought about
theirs the more likely it seemed that May’s orbit was a very small,
short and probably wobbly one, resembling our moon’s one-day
rotation around the earth. Barry’s orbit was much larger and his
enclosed hers, so she couldn’t escape its gravitational pull.

As for Iris and Laurie, well they were like
planets that had collided and fused into a single orbit. Until Iris
had died and escaped Laurie, leaving him to spin through the lonely
universe, alone.

Back to Troy and me . . . ha ha! Orbits
existing in totally different universes, stars racing away from
each other at unimaginable speeds, escaping while the going was
good.

That’s how it seemed to me in the near dark,
lying in bed contemplating stars, orbits, escapes and the pairing
of people. (Deep thoughts, I know. You’re not obliged to read
them.)

After I’d leaned over to turn off my desk
light the room got darker than it should have. At first I didn’t
know how this had happened until I glanced towards my mirror (in
which I had seen the first picture only a week ago - it seemed so
much longer) and saw that it’s silver surface was grey and blotchy
and seemingly in motion. Feeling scared (understatement supremo) I
nevertheless got out of bed and went slowly and cautiously towards
it. Without really realising it my arms were clutched protectively
over my chest and stomach, my breathing was shallow, my heart
pumping somewhat faster (under-understatement) than usual.

The dark patchiness of the mirror, which
I

noticed as soon as I got
up close to it, was the result of a succession of black and white
images passing across it, chasing one another as if someone were
flicking the pages of a photo album without stopping to look
properly at the pictures. The flickering speed of the images and
the fact that my room was in near darkness meant that none of them
were at all distinct or able to be focused on. I thought I
recognised some of them - perhaps the pictures I’d already seen
during the previous week - but there was so much more that was new
and unfamiliar. I wished I could make sense of them all even as, at
the same time, I wished the whole crazy confusion of it would all
just stop, go away and leave me alone.

But it didn’t stop. The flash-past
continued. Once or twice there were blurs of colour, but mainly it
was shades of grey. Utterly terrified now, not even pretending I
knew what to do anymore, I stumbled back to bed and crawled in,
turning my back on the mirror in the hope I wouldn’t see its
madness anymore. Even so, when I closed my eyes the blurry
procession of pictures continued behind my eyelids, manic, like car
headlamps search-lighting frantically across the drapes, like a
never-ending migraine.

‘
Enough! Enough!’ I heard
myself screaming.

Of course that woke the rest of my family
(including Harry, bless him). Mum and Dad came rushing to my room,
Harry close on their heels. They turned on the main light. I was
almost blinded by it but it scared the darkness away. The darkness,
and the pictures in the mirror.

Mum/Dad (simultaneously): ‘Athens, what
on

earth’s the matter!’

Harry: ‘She woke me. I was fast asleep.’

Me: ‘It was . . . it was . . . (I fell back
onto my pillow - a dramatic movement, but genuine nonetheless - as
well as onto my lies.) ‘Nothing, I said. Only a nightmare. Of the
worst variety.’

And thereby I lost the opportunity to tell
all to the people who mattered the most.

The following morning I picked up my mobile
and delivered a text message to the one person who might be willing
to listen to such a strange story as mine. Someone who was a little
strange himself and not emotionally involved with me in any
way.

‘
DNEIRF A SA. ESAELP.
PLEH!’ I wrote.

It wasn’t as difficult as
I’d thought it would be.

More than a magician’s assistant

Troy arrived at the same moment as the mail.
More about both of these arrivals in a moment. Firstly, my ‘long
awaited’ decision and reply to Harry’s ‘invitation’.

‘Well?’

‘
Well what?’ I snapped at
Harry.

‘
Are you on, or
not?’

‘
All right,’ I said to
Harry. ‘Whatever. Just leave me alone.’

‘
You
are
in
a bad way. Try and make some sense. It can’t be both. If you’re on
we need to start rehearsing our act now.’

Our
act!

‘
Come on then,’ I said
bustling him ahead of

me, taking him utterly by surprise. ‘What
are you waiting for?’

Learning how to disappear into Harry’s
wonder chest was one way of escaping, temporarily at least, the
nightmare of the mirrors. Right then, the thought of the
mirror-less darkness of the chest seemed a lesser nightmare. Also,
saying ‘yes’ to Harry seemed easier than waiting around to find out
if Troy would turn up. He hadn’t texted back yet. Perhaps he was
peeved that I’d copied his backwards writing style rather than
being inventive and sending him a palindromic sentence instead.

I hadn’t heard anything
more from Rachel and Emma. What would they think if they ever found
out I’d asked Troy for help instead of asking them. ‘Why didn’t you
come to
us
?’
would be their cry. Would they understand it was because the three
of us were too close?

Dad was well on the way to dismantling the
chimney. Mum, as always, had left early for work (another day in
court) and wouldn’t be back until late. So it was either the
rehearsal or the mirrors.

I have to say that I
quickly learned to appreciate a magician’s reluctance to divulge
the secrets of his (or her) trade. As you know, for years whenever
Harry did a trick good enough to impress me I’d go on and on at him
to let me into the secret of how it worked.

But now when I finally
knew a secret I was disappointed. Firstly, because it was actually
ridiculously simple (‘Is
that
all?’ I said, as soon as

Harry showed me) and secondly because I

suddenly felt as if the magic of the magic
(does that make sense?) was now less than it had been. As far as
this particular trick was concerned I could never again enjoy it
for its own sake. Now that I knew how it was done it wasn’t as
special anymore, not in the same innocent, childish, wondering
way.

I asked Harry a silly question. ‘How do you
cope with knowing how it all works?’ I said to him.

‘
I try to
do the trick as well as I can,’ he replied. ‘I try to do it so well
that even if people guess how it’s done they still can’t be
absolutely sure they’re right. They might be
almost
sure but it’s my job to leave
a doubt in their minds.’

Hmm. Not a bad answer from
my little brat of a brother. Who would have thought he could have
been so sensible and serious. I pondered his reply and decided that
Harry was right. So that’s what I would also have to do now as I
helped him. I had to do my part so well, that I would leave people
guessing and leave them wanting to see more of us. And the truth
was, the challenge of being fast enough to turn that escape trick
into a spectacular swap routine somehow helped trigger the
exhibitionist in me, helped suppress the claustrophobic me. It made
me actually
want
to perform.

Let calmness prevail

We took a break for lunch. I was exhausted
but I didn’t care. Practising the trick, which was much more
physically and mentally demanding than I

would have believed, had also helped me
stop

dwelling on the other things. Like, was Troy
ever going to turn up to PLEH?

‘
Nice to see that the two
of you are getting on amicably for once,’ said Dad as he, Harry and
I appeared together in the kitchen. (‘Appeared’ as in ‘arrived’,
not in any magical Potterish sense you understand.)

‘
Wonders will never cease,’
I agreed. ‘We’re working together.’