Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [68]
It was then time for a little levitation. The “Fairy Funambulist,” was a rather simple idea. A tightrope was installed on the stage, upon which Stella started to walk with her arms stretched apart, pretending to feel dizzy. Handyside opened a white umbrella whose pattern consisted of a black spiral. He made it spin in his hand in front of Stella’s eyes, and the girl, now supposedly mesmerized, resumed her walk without any hesitation, the umbrella in her hand. Then, taking a pair of scissors, Handyside cut the rope in front of her. As both ends fell to the floor, Stella stopped, but then took another step and continued the rest of the way suspended in mid-air, closing the umbrella and waking up only as she reached the platform. This was another roaring success.
Stella came down and bowed to the audience, but as she stood up, her head remained stuck in midair, while the rest of her body faded out. Handyside, who sometimes had a bit of the mime about him, looked at the head, scratching his quiff in disbelief, and requested a lit candle to pass under the severed head, while Stella provided lively faces and winks that made Brentford understand what Gabriel would find so attractive in her.
Feigning a sudden inspiration, Handyside blindfolded Stella’s head. Spencer brought him objects collected from the audience, which Handyside then held in front of himself with his back toward the bodiless girl. This routine of guessing things was rather worn out in itself, but mixing it with the Stella illusion made it really uncanny, and all the more so because Handyside, who remained silent, could not be using any word code.
Loud applause ensued, and Brentford was starting to feel dizzy and exhausted from the various humiliations and violations of natural laws he was supposed to have witnessed. Handyside’s relentless inventiveness and the stifling atmosphere below the mezzanine were turning his mind into some white-noisy blank, and if it hadn’t been for the atrocious blizzard outside, he would have been happy to breathe some fresh air.
But there was still the pièce de résistance, “Summoning the Spirits.” This time, it wasn’t Stella who joined the magician, but a certain Phoebe, the Phantom Princess, a lithe red-haired girl in a white gown, whom Sybil, taking Brentford’s opera glasses from his hands, recognized instantly.
“This is the girl I saw in front of the Greenhouse.”
“Who?”
“The one who fainted. I told you,” she said, with a pout of mock reproach. It was one of their most common routines, Sybil complaining that Brentford never listened to her.
The poor Phantom Princess, explained Handyside, had been accidently mesmerized and could not be awakened without risking her life in the process. She had wandered far in the land of the spirits, and could materialize amazing ectoplasms of the deceased. This was not a spectacle for everyone, he added, and children and sensitive women should be spared the sight of it.
The medium malgré elle was sitting on a chair, her hands in her lap. Silence and darkness prevailed on the stage and in the audience. Handyside was massaging his left temple, the veins of his forehead bulging from concentration. As he did so, a wisp of smoke started to slither out of the girl’s mouth, slowly morphing into vague, transparent, empty-eyed human faces, with lips seemingly moving. Then one of the shapes developed a full human body and, still attached to Phoebe’s mouth by the train of her gown, made a few spectral steps across the stage. “The ghost walks” whispered someone in the audience, eliciting subdued laughter from the crowd, for in magical slang, that meant that the magician was being paid his due at the end of the show—the rarest and most difficult of all tricks.
But Brentford was not laughing or smiling at any of this. At all. With a shiver, he had recognized