19

The headmaster applauded with everyone else when Morris nodded and stood up from the bench. Dave Brick had been parked on an empty chair far at the back of the room, apart from the rest of the students. Mr. Ridpath stared at him with loathing for a moment, then began to sidle toward Mr. Broome, hoping for one last word, but Mr. Broome looked straight into the center of his narrow vain face, and Mr. Ridpath froze solid to the floor. 'Attention, boys,' Mr. Broome called out.

When we were all turned around in our seats to face him, he began speaking and walking up the side of the auditorium to the bottom of the stage, and we swiveled to watch him - it was a display of power. 'I hate to interrupt these interesting proceedings, but I want you to bear with me and share a fascinating story. I promise that this will only take a moment of your time, and then we can enjoy the second part of this excellent show. Gentlemen, we have finally been given the answer to the single greatest problem this school has faced since its founding, and I want all of you personally to witness the final act of that problem.' He smiled. By now he was at the podium, and with mock casualness, he leaned one elbow on the blond wood: he was tense as a whippet. 'Some of us will be meeting at three-fifteen in the assistant headmaster's office. That will be a private meeting. At four-fifteen I want the entire school reassembled here just as you are now. This school has been unwell, and it is time to cut back the diseased branches.' He gave that taut, creased smile again, and I saw in him the same devil who had burned in Skeleton Ridpath's face just before he had beaten Del. 'And now I believe we have some magic from two members of the first year.'

It sounded like Broome wanted to stage a full-scale spectacular after school, with limbs lopped off in public and Christians thrown to lions. He wanted to answer the student performances with his own. That devil who had shone from his eyes was a devil of ambition and jealousy, who could not accept being upstaged. Tom and Del quietly left their seats and walked past Mr. Broome to go up the steps to the stage.

Broome drifted off to the side and leaned against the far wall beside one of the big doors, crossing his arms over his chest. He was smiling to himself. Tom and Del pulled the curtains shut, and for several moments we could dimly hear footsteps and the shifting of equipment. The piano, on casters, rolled back with a rumbling like a truck's. For some time we heard the rustling of material. Then the curtain twitched and pulled smoothly back, revealing a painted sign on a stand.

FLANAG1NI AND NIGHT
ILLUSIONISTS

Most of the students seated below the stage began to laugh.
White smoke poured across the stage, billowed and hung, then began to drift up toward the beams and lights, and we could see that the sign had gone. In its place stood Tom Flanagan, dressed in what looked like an Indian bedspread and a turban of the same material. Beside him was the high table draped in black velvet, and on the other side of the table stood Del. He wore black evening dress and a cape. Deep laughter erupted again, and the two boys bowed in unison. When they straightened up, the smoke now entirely gone, their faces revealed their nervousness.
'We are Flanagini and Night,' Tom intoned, sticking to his script in spite of the laughter. 'We are magicians. We come to amaze and entertain, to terrify and delight.' He flicked the velvet cover off the table, and something that looked like a fiery ball or shooting star lifted off from beneath and burned up six feet above their heads and winked out. Laker Broome watched it as if it were as ordinary as a horsefly. 'And to amuse, perhaps.' Del twitched the cape from his shoulders, twirled it over the table, and a four-foot-high stuffed white rabbit bounded off, so lifelike and grotesque that a few boys gasped. We were all in shock for a second, and then Del grasped it by one tall ear, bounced it off his foot, and threw it over his shoulder into the blackness behind him. There was an instinctive professional grace in his movements, and that (and the realization that the rabbit was a stuffed toy) made us all laugh, with them now, not against them.
They did several clever card tricks using boys from the audience; a series of tricks using scarves and ropes, including one in which Night proved that he could escape in three minutes from a rope knotted by two football players; they produced a dozen sprays of real flowers from the air.
Then Flanagini put Night into a cabinet and pierced it with swords, and when Night emerged whole, he pushed forward another cabinet - this one black and covered with Chinese patterns - and put Flanagini inside it. 'The speaking head, or Falada,' Night announced, banging the cabinet on all sides to demonstrate that it was solid. He shut a lacquered panel and hid Flanagini's body. The turbaned head looked out impassively. 'Are you ready?' Night asked, and the head nodded. The top panel was shut. Night produced a long sword, took an orange from some pocket of the table, tossed the orange in the air, and swung the sword around to slice it in half. 'A well-honed samurai sword,' he said, and flexed it. 'A deadly fighting instrument.' He whistled it through the air again, and then slotted it sideways into the seam where the two panels met. He wrapped both his hands in black handkerchieves and pushed the flat sword deeply into the notch, where it seemed to meet an obstruction. Night paused to wrap the handkerchieves more tightly around his palms, put his hands again on the sword, and pushed. He grunted, and pushed again. The sword slid through to the other side of the cabinet, and Night yanked it out and wiped it with one of the handkerchieves. Then he pushed the bottom section of the cabinet away so that it no longer supported the top portion. He opened the panel of the bottom section to show Flanagini's body from the neck down. 'The dance of death,' he said, and rapped the side of the cabinet with the flat of the sword. For a moment the body in the Indian garment convulsed and trembled. 'The speaking head.' He moved to the left of the top section and opened the panel. Flanagini's head stared out from beneath the turban. 'What is the first law of magic?' Night asked, and the floating head answered, 'As above, so below.' 'And what is the second law of magic?' Night asked. 'The physical world is a bauble.' 'And what is the third law of magic?' 'Reality is extremity.' 'And how many books are in the library?' 'I don't remember,' came the indisputable voice of Tom Flanagan, and laughter jolted us as if we had been in a spell. Night closed both panels and moved the lower portion of the cabinet back beneath the upper section. When he swung open the panels, Tom stepped out, intact.
Wild applause.
'An illusion only,' Night said, 'a titillation, an amusement.'
(A few sniggers, provoked by the syllable 'tit.')
Night drew himself up and was black and serious as a crow's wing.
'But what is illusory can be true, which is magic's fourth law, like lightning here and then gone, like the smile of a wizard.'
(White smoke began to billow across the stage again.)
'And man's dreams and deepest fantasies, these truthful illusions, are magic's truest country. Like the dream of - '
(The big doors on the side of the auditorium suddenly clicked open and swung wide. One of the boys in the back, several rows behind me, shouted.)
' - opening the doors of the mind.'
(He spread his arms wide.)
'The mind opens, the shoulders open, the body opens. And we can… '
Smoke, not white but yellow and greasy, puffed in through the doors.
Del stopped intoning his magical gibberish and looked at the doors. His face went rubbery. The pose of professional mumbo-jumbo fell away, and he was a confused fourteen-year-old boy. In the second just before the auditorium went crazy, I had time to see that Tom, Flanagini, was also looking at something, and that he too was stricken. But he was not looking at the open doors: he was staring straight back up at the rear of the auditorium - so high up that he must have been nearly looking at the ceiling back there.
Mr. Broome took a step across the opening of the doors, saw what there was to see, and then turned around and pointed at the small, now insignificant pair on stage. He screamed, 'You did this!'
'You're right,' Tom said to me at the Zanzibar. 'I never even saw what was outside until a couple of seconds later. I was standing there, waiting for Del to say that last word.
'Fly.' He'd said the whole speech except for that, and then he was going to float up and amaze everybody. We'd worked out a way to get those doors open weeks before, and if Del could make it, he was going to try to get as far as the first door and then just walk out, and that would be the end of the show. I kept waiting to hear that last word, 'fly,' and I was scared stiff - but then I looked back at that end of the auditorium and I saw two things that scared me a hell of a lot worse. One of them was Skeleton Ridpath. He was terrible. He was grinning. He looked like a big bat, or a huge spider - something awful. And the other thing I saw jumped into being a fraction of a second later, as if Ridpath and I had jointly summoned it up. It was a boy engulfed in flames - swallowed up in fire, fire that couldn't be there, fire that just seemed to stream out of him. I looked at him with my mouth open, and the burning boy disappeared. I don't know how I stayed on my feet. When Laker Broome started shouting at us, I looked down and saw what Del saw, the whole Field House blazing away. All that smoke pouring out, and the fire jumping and jumping. I looked back toward Skeleton, but he was already gone - maybe he was never there in the first place. Then the whole place went nuts.