The Prestige

While I speak the stage lights brighten, and catch the polished metal supports, the golden coils of wire, the glistening globes of glass. The apparatus is a thing of beauty, but it is a menacing beauty because everyone by now has heard for themselves of some of the deadly power of the electrical current. Newspapers have carried accounts of horrible deaths and burns caused by the new force already available in many cities.

The apparatus of The New Transported Man is designed to remind them of these appalling accounts. It carries numerous incandescent electric lamps, some of which come alight even as I speak. At one side is a large glass globe, inside which a brilliant arc of electricity fizzes and crackles excitingly. The main part of the apparatus appears, to the audience, to be a long wooden bench, three feet above the floor of the stage. They can see past it, around it, underneath it. At one end, by the arc-lit glass chamber, a small raised platform is bestrewn with dangling wires, their bare ends dangerously exposed. Above the platform is a canopy where many of the incandescent lamps are placed. At the further end is a metal cone, decorated with a spiral of smaller glowing lamps. This is mounted on a gimbals device that allows it to be swivelled in several directions. All around the main part are small concavities and shelves, where bare terminals lie in wait. The whole thing is emitting a loud humming noise, as of immense hidden energies within.

I explain to the audience that I would invite some of its members on to the stage to examine the device for themselves, but for the immense danger to them. I hint at earlier accidents. Instead, I say, I have devised a few simple demonstrations of the power inherent within the machine. I allow some magnesium powder to fall across two bared contacts, and a brilliant white flash momentarily blinds the members of the audience closest to the stage! While the smoke from it balloons upwards I take a sheet of paper and drop it across another semi-concealed part of the apparatus; this immediately bursts into flame, and its smoke also rises dramatically to the rigging loft above. The humming sound increases in volume. The apparatus seems to be alive, only barely constraining the frightful energies that lie within.

At stage left my female assistant appears with a wheeled cabinet. This is strongly made of wood, but because it is built on wheels she is able to turn the thing around so it might be seen from all sides. Then she lets down the front and sides to show that it is empty.

I grimace sadly at the audience then signal to the girl, who brings to me two immense dark-brown gauntlets, made to seem as if they are of leathern material. When these are covering my hands she leads me to the apparatus, until I stand behind it. The audience can see most of my body still, and satisfy themselves that there are no concealed mirrors or shields. I lower my two gauntleted hands to the surface of the platform, and as I do so the sound of electrical tension increases, and there is another brilliant discharge of electrical energy. I reel back, as if in shock.

The girl moves away from the apparatus, cowering a little. I break off from my introduction to plead with her to leave the stage for her own safety. At first she resists, then gladly hurries into the wings.

I reach up to the directional cone, grip it gingerly with my heavily gauntleted hands, and move it with great care until its apex is pointed directly at the cabinet.

The illusion is approaching its climax. From the orchestra pit there comes a roll of drums. I place both hands on the platform once more, and magically all the remaining lamps shine out brightly. The sinister hum increases. I first sit on the platform, and swivel around so that I can stretch my legs out, then lower myself until I am lying full length, surrounded by the evidence of the terrible electrical forces.

I raise my arms, and pull off first one, then the other gauntlet. As I lower my arms I allow my hands to droop below the level of the platform. One of them, the one the audience can see, falls casually into the receptacle where, a few seconds earlier, a piece of paper had been ignited.

There is a brilliant, blinding flash of light, and all the lights on the apparatus fuse into darkness.

In the same instant… I vanish from the platform.

The cabinet bursts open, and I am seen hunched up inside.

I roll slowly out of the cabinet, and collapse on to the floor. I am bathed in stage lights. Gradually I come to my senses. I stand. I blink in the brightness of the lights. I face the audience. I turn towards the platform, indicate where I had been, turn back to the cabinet immediately behind me, and indicate where I had arrived.

I take my bow.

The audience has seen me transmogrified. Before their eyes I was catapulted by the power of electricity from one part of the stage to another. Ten feet of empty space. Twenty feet, thirty feet, depending on the size of the stage.