The Houdini Effect (14 page)

‘
Don’t mention it,’ I said.
‘But you’ll have to tell me what it is you’re going to do and what
you expect me to do.’

‘
Mainly wave and point,’
Harry said. ‘That’s the distraction part.’

‘
Sounds simple enough,’ I
said.

‘
The timing’s going to be
really important,’ Harry emphasized. ‘It’ll take
practise.’

‘
What will I have to wave
and point at?’ I asked.

Harry looked round furtively as if there
might be spying magicians listening in to our conversation. In the
sudden stillness we heard the underground slithering of Dad beneath
the floorboards, somewhere close by. Harry smiled. ‘The new routine
won’t be that different from what Dad’s doing now,’ he said,
ominously. ‘Come with me. I’ll show you.’

As I followed him I remembered the flaw I’d
overlooked. The talent quest, auditions included, was going to be
televised.

Exposure and humiliation
on a grand scale were the only likely outcomes of my kindness
towards Harry. But it was too late to back down now. Harry would
never have talked to me again if I

had.

The chest

Harry led me to the garage, a minefield of
odds

and ends. There was no room for the car,
that’s how bad it was. Dad kept his building materials in

there: sawhorses, various
tools, pots of paint, a mobile scaffold almost as big as a car, the
works. But not only those things. Dad was a collector. He kept and
hoarded stuff from previous houses. Sometimes he went to garage
sales and picked up rubbish he thought would come in useful some
day. Maybe some of it would, but when was anybody’s guess. You name
it, the garage was where you’d find it. If you could find ‘it’
among all the junk. Right then the place was at its worst, since no
one had had time to sort out anything following the move. Maybe no
one ever would get round to sorting it. Who, except Dad, would want
to?

Harry manoeuvred his way
to a dusty heap in the far corner.

‘
What’s down there?’ I
asked.

Harry began to drag various unrecognisable
objects aside. ‘This is where I saw it last,’ he said. ‘I
remembered it after I’d had a look at my illusions books again,
like you told me to. I thought, it’ll be perfect.’

‘
But what
is
it
?’

‘
This.’ Harry heaved at
another object, something large and wooden. ‘Give me a
hand.’

Together we dragged the thing into the
light.

‘
Great isn’t it?’ said
Harry.

It
was a wooden box.
It
looked a little bit like a

pirates’ treasure
chest.
It
had a
curved lid and two metal bands that fastened the lid to the
box.

‘
Reckon I can fit inside?’
Harry asked.

‘
No trouble. It would fit
me, too,’ I said. ‘Not that I’d ever try to get inside,’ I added
quickly,

thinking of Dad in the claustrophobic
darkness under the house.

Harry gave me a furtive glance. Then he
patted

the chest as if it was a beastly friend.
‘Houdini did a trick like this. Escaped from a locked chest.
Amazing.’

‘
You
are
not
going to
be shut into that thing are you,’ I said.

‘
Course I am,’ said Harry.
‘And I’m going to escape from it.’

‘
How on earth can that be
any easier than getting out of a straitjacket,’ I asked.

‘
It’ll be much easier,’
said Harry.

‘
How?’ I
repeated.

Once more Harry looked around furtively.
‘I’m swearing you to secrecy,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

He waited for me to reply.

‘
Okay, okay, I won’t breath
a word,’ I said.

‘
I’m going to make some
modifications to it,’ said Harry. (Wow, big secret!)

‘
I’ll show you later what
they are,’ he promised. ‘When I’ve made them.’

‘
You’d
better to check with Dad first and find out if you’re even allowed
to have the thing,’ I told him. ‘Especially if you’re going to muck
around with it -
modify
it I should say.’

‘
Huh!’ Harry laughed. ‘He
doesn't even remember it’s here,’ he said. ‘Won’t miss it. No
worries about that.’

‘
Hmm, yes, well, you’re
probably right as far as that goes.’ I shrugged, unwilling to argue
anymore about it. ‘Okay, best of luck then. When do I come into the
picture?’

‘
When I’m ready,’ said
Harry. ‘It shouldn’t take

long. I know what I have to do with it. Soon
as it’s finished, I’ll let you know. I’ll get on with it right
away. Then we can start rehearsals.’

‘
Rehearsals?’

‘
Of course, we have to
practise. I told you that.’

‘
Wouldn’t
one run through be enough?’ I said, seeing whatever free time I
might still possibly have these holidays slipping away. I almost
added, ‘Don’t leave it too long, my social diary is almost full
already’, but I said nothing of the sort. At the present time I
couldn’t even go out and
be
social. Everything depended on the mirrors and
what they did next. And, to tell the truth, after the
dis-appointment of Troy, going out and being social had lost its
appeal, big time.

The third time

I left Harry to begin
altering the wooden chest and sloped back inside. Try as I might, I
just couldn’t get out of my head what I had twice seen in the
mirrors. I knew those two experiences were making me feel stressed
and moody. And paralysed. If I’d been at the pool, I would have
been treading water, getting nowhere. It’s true, the pictures of
Laurie and May hadn’t been frightening in themselves. What was
scary was the fact that I’d seen them. That they’d been there at
all.

I couldn’t just ignore what had happened and
get on with life. And there was nothing worse than

having to wait for another episode. Strange
as it might sound, I wished there was something I could do to
precipitate the appearance of another mirror image. If I left the
mirrors to themselves they were only going to lie in wait for me,
panicking me with

their pictures when I
least expected them, and least wanted them, to. If I could meet the
mirrors half-way, so to speak (and don’t ask me how!),
it

might help me in some way to work out what
on earth was happening in them and why.

In the house I encountered Dad who had
finally finished his exploration beneath the floorboards.

‘
I couldn’t stand going
down there,’ I said, immediately reminding myself about Harry’s
proposed claustrophobic chest escape. I had to bite my tongue from
mentioning it.

Dad looked at me and said,
‘You don’t have to. However I did mean to ask you why you’re moping
about the house and not gallivanting about as you usually do when
you’re free of school? You haven’t fallen out with Emma and Rachel
have you?’

‘
No,’ I said, quickly. ‘We
had plans but . . . but they haven’t worked out so far. You know
how it goes.’ I tried to sound convincing but suspected Dad wasn’t
convinced. He didn’t push the question though. I almost wished he
had.

‘
Best laid plans and all
that,’ he said. ‘Yes, I understand. Well if you want something to
occupy your unexpected leisure I have plenty of suggestions, none
of which involve crawling under the house you’ll be pleased to
hear.’

‘
Thanks Dad,’ I said. ‘But
I’ve got a biggish school project that needs doing and I’ve
promised

to help Harry with his escape plan.’

‘
You don’t say!’ Dad looked
and sounded amazed. ‘Well, that’s a turn up for the
books.’

‘
Don’t ask, it’s a long
story,’ I said.

‘
Speaking of Harry, we
haven’t seen much of

him lately either,’ said Dad. ‘He keeps
promising us a gala performance of his straitjacket escape when
he’s finished perfecting it.’

‘
Don’t hold your breath.
The straitjacket escape is out now Dad.’

‘
Is it?’ Dad sounded
disappointed. ‘He hasn’t given up on the talent quest has
he?’

‘
No, not at all,’ I
reassured him. ‘He’s just taken a change of direction.’

‘
Which is?’

‘
A surprise,’ I said. ‘If I
told you I’d have to kill you. You’ll see.’

‘
I’ll look forward to it,’
said Dad. ‘I hope he wins. Imagine if he does. The prize money
would come in really handy for the house.’

Parents sometimes get the strangest
notions.

‘
What makes you think
you’ll be in line for any of the cash if he wins, which he won’t,’
I said.

‘
You’re starting to sound
more like the old Athens,’ Dad laughed. ‘I reckon he’s got as good
a chance as anybody, especially now you’re in on the
act.’

‘
He’ll be up against people
from all over the country,’ I said.

‘
Ah well, let’s wait and
see,’ said Dad. ‘As long as he has fun taking part, that’s the
important thing. And as for the money we’re all family aren’t we?
Share and share alike.’

‘
Yeah, right!’ I
said.

I left Dad to his delusory hope of getting
a

single cent out of Harry should he win the
big prize (the only prize, in fact, if I remembered correctly, not
fair on the runners-up it seemed to me) and carried on to my room.
I had a vague idea of plonking myself on the end of my bed in
front

of my bedroom mirror and
simply waiting for Laurie and Iris to reappear. Mad no doubt but
since nothing else came to mind, that’s precisely what I
did.

While I waited I mulled over the strangeness
of what I had seen so far. Two images, both of Laurie (as confirmed
by May’s photograph) and therefore Iris as well (elementary, dear
Watson) taken a distance apart in time because the protagonists had
obviously aged between pictures.

I visualised the photo of Laurie that May
had shown me and then remembered something May had told me in
passing. She’d said that Laurie and Iris had photos of themselves
in the house. Lots of photos, photos of themselves at important
stages of their lives. I hadn’t thought twice about this. It was
what people did, except maybe May and Barry. (I hadn’t seen a
single family photo in their house, had I?)

Mum and Dad had photos
everywhere, too: their wedding, our family holidays, birthdays and
other special occasions. Even I had a few photos framed in my room,
including one with Em and Rach and me at the beach. But now,
waiting for something to happen in the mirror, this thought
occurred to me. (Looking back it seemed so obvious - it will have
already occurred to you, I’m sure - but sometimes I’m very slow off
the mark.)

The images of Iris and Laurie that I had
seen had been static things. In my memory (a deceptive

attribute, as May had
pointed out) and in my imagination the couple had moved, looked
into each other’s eyes and even blinked as they watched the sunlit
sea from the hillside. I knew in reality that they hadn’t moved at
all. The images

I’d seen were like
photographs, completely still. Photo snaps, taken in time but now
out of time. Interesting, I thought, not that this speculation got
me any further in understanding how or why they were turning up in
the mirrors.

While I’d been pondering
this I had taken my eyes off the bedroom mirror. When I turned back
to check on it, Laurie and Iris were back in the frame, so to
speak.

I was cold all over and felt myself starting
to shiver even though my room was warm. All sound, however, seemed
to have been completely sucked away. It was as if the house had
become a silent vacuum. The world contracted into the silver,
reflective pool of the mirror, the picture it showed

me and a very faint, almost distant, ghostly
reflection of the me who sat gazing into it.

Iris and Laurie looked
older still, older yet just as happy. This time they weren’t inside
their version of my bedroom or on a hillside either but out of
doors, in a garden, relaxing under a tree. Something about the
shape of the tree was familiar. I recognised the way the trunk
forked about a metre off the ground, one branch bending to the
right while the other went straight up. Then I worked out which
tree it was. Even though in the mirror-picture the tree was a lot
younger it was the very same tree that still grew in our back yard.
Its upper branches had overspread our washing line to

such an extent that when birds settled on
them their droppings sometimes plopped onto the sheets and shirts
(the white laundry especially, what else?). Dad kept threatening to
move either one or the other. ‘Shift the line,’ I’d heard Mum
saying,

‘and spare the tree.’ And Dad replying,
‘That’s what I want to do but the pole’s embedded in a bloody great
chunk of concrete that will probably

do me in me if I try to lift it out.’

So meantime both the tree
and the washing line were still there,
in
situ
.