The Prestige

Yesterday, the Tesla apparatus arrived back from Derbyshire, and with Adam Wilson's assistance I immediately unpacked it and erected it. According to my clock it took under fifteen minutes. We must be able to be sure of doing it within ten minutes, when working in a theatre. Mr Alley's sheet of instructions declares that when he and Tesla were testing its portability they were able to erect the whole thing in under twelve minutes.

Adam Wilson knows the secret of the illusion, as he must. Adam has been working for me for more than five years, and I believe I can trust him. To be as sure as reasonably possible I have offered him a confidentiality bonus of ten pounds, to be paid into an accumulating fund in his name after each successful performance. He and Gertrude are expecting their second child.

I have been putting in more work on my stage presentation of In a Flash, as well as rehearsing several of my other illusions. As it is several months since my last public performance I am a little rusty. I confess I approached such routine work without enthusiasm, but once I settled down to it I began to enjoy myself.

2nd February 1901

Tonight I performed at the Finsbury Park Empire, but did not include In a Flash. I accepted the commission as a way of testing the water, to experience the feeling once again of performing before a live audience.

My version of The Disappearing Piano went down exceptionally well, and I was applauded loud and long, but at the end of my act I felt myself frustrated and dissatisfied.

I hunger to perform the Tesla illusion!

14th February 1901

I rehearsed In a Flash twice yesterday, and will do so twice again tomorrow. I dare not make it any more than that. I shall be performing it on Saturday evening at the Trocadero in Holloway Road, then at least once again in the week following. I believe that if I can perform it regularly enough then extra rehearsals, beyond stage movements, misdirection and patter, should not be necessary.

Tesla warned me that there would be aftereffects, and these are indeed profound. It is no trivial matter to use the apparatus. Each time I pass through it I suffer.

In the first place there is the physical pain. My body is wrenched apart, disassembled. Every tiny particle of me is thrown asunder, becoming one with the aether. In a fraction of a second, a fraction so small that it cannot be measured, my body is converted into electrical waves. It is radiated through space. It is reassembled at its designated target.

Slam! I am broken apart! Slam! I am together again!

It is a violent shock that explodes in every part of me, in every direction. Imagine a steel bar smashing into the palm of your hand. Now imagine ten or twenty more hammering down in the same place from different angles. More fall on your fingers, your wrist. A hundred more strike the back of your hand. The ends of your fingers. Every joint.

More explode out from inside your flesh.

Now spread the pain through your whole body, inside and out.

Slam!

A millionth of a second of total agony!

Slam again!

That is how it feels.

Yet I arrive in the selected place, and I am exactly as I was that millionth of a second earlier. I am whole in myself, and identical to myself, but I am in the shock of ultimate pain.

The first time I used the Tesla apparatus, in the basement of Caldlow House, with no warning of what I was to experience, I collapsed to the floor in the belief that I had died. It did not seem possible that my heart, my brain, could survive such an explosion of pain. I had no thoughts, no emotional reactions. It felt as if I had died, and I acted as if I had died.

As I slumped to the floor, Julia, who of course was there with me for the test, ran to my side. My first lucid memory in the post-death world is of her gentle hands reaching into my shirt to feel for a sign of life. I opened my eyes, in shock and amazement, happy beyond words to find her beside me, to feel her tenderness. Quickly I was able to stand, to reassure her that I was well, to hold her and kiss her, to be myself once more.

In truth, then, physical recovery from this brutal experience is itself speedy, but the mental consequences are formidable.

On the day of that first test in Derbyshire, I forced myself to repeat the test in the afternoon, but as a result I was cast into the darkest gloom for much of the Christmas period. I had died twice. I had become one of the walking dead, a damned soul.

And the reminders of what I did then are the materials that later had to be put away. I could not even face that gruesome task until New Year's Eve, as I have described.