The Prestige

With Borden somewhere around, a terrible certainty struck me that he was about to sabotage me yet again! What if he was lurking inside the loge, and gave me a shove as I arrived on the ledge? I felt the electrical tension mounting ineluctably around me. I could not prevent myself turning anxiously around to look up at the box. I could just make it out through the deadly blue-white electrical sparks. All seemed well; there was nothing there to block my arrival, and although I couldn't see into the box itself, where the seats are placed, it did not look as if anyone was there.

Borden's intent was much more sinister, and a moment later I found out what it was. In the very instant that I turned to look up at the loge, two things happened simultaneously.

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.