The Houdini Effect

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)
c
onfirms 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.