Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [33]
He didn’t even glance in its direction. When he stood on stage, the dark wing-space to his left became a blind spot, darker even than the unseen audience. He could sense their presence, their shifting and breathing, but from the wings came only stillness. The man had screamed into the gag once, muffledly and horribly, when the sack shattered his chest. Then there had been no sound except Octave’s own shallow breathings. With what had seemed to him great presence of mind, he had retrieved his handkerchief and made his soft, multiple way from the theatre and, by various routes, home.
The manager had considered closing the next night, but as the man hadn’t actually died, he told Octave to proceed with his performance. And then things had gone on as before. The police had talked to Octave. They thought it was all an accident. The man had not recovered consciousness; they expected him to die any day. Octave supposed that by now he had. He had deliberately not asked the manager any questions or looked at the papers or the stains on the floor.
But tonight... For some reason, Octave’s eyes kept drifting to his left. He couldn’t help it. For three nights, that shadowy offstage area had been a blank, without definition or presence. Now, suddenly it had acquired substance. It seemed to him to be a bulk of darkness. Solid. Massive. Like a weight that might fall on him.
Octave took a deep breath and drew the string of bright scarves from his sleeve. There was tepid applause. His heart wasn’t in his act tonight. He performed the opening tricks with even less flair than usual, and though the cabinet ‘illusion’ still stunned the spectators, their enthusiastic reaction reached him from a distance, as if through thick glass.
He had discovered that he wasn’t cut out to be a murderer. He spent that whole first night crying, like a frightened, remorseful child. All eight of him, blubbering like infants in his sordid rooms, some of them on the bed, one on the single hard chair, some on the floor, some standing. All weeping. It had been disgusting. And he had been afraid someone would hear, wonder at the sound of so many in rooms supposedly occupied by one. Not that the bulk of his neighbours were even in at night, and those who were generally weren’t sober. He had chosen his seedy neighbourhood and down-at‐heel apartments carefully.
Oh, what was he going to do? His life was already wretched before. Hiding. Pretending. Having to do without servants. Covertly taking his bulky washing to an indifferent Chinese laundryman streets away. Cleaning the coal dust off the sills. Hauling his own hot water. Huddled indoors when he wasn’t at the theatre, shivering, not looking at one another. One went out occasionally for air and sunshine and exercise, but two couldn’t. It wasn’t simply the care that had to be taken not to be seen leaving the building twice. It was that the multiple sensory input was almost unbearable. He could just stand it for the time every day it took to sneak to and from the theatre, journeys that took hours. And all of them had to go. He’d tried staying partly at home and it was a disaster – the spatial separation was so disorienting he almost didn’t get through the act. Now three hid in a storage room while the others performed. It wasn’t so bad in the storage room. It was dark, like the interiors of his cabinets. Things were better in the dark.
Except for the dark at the side of the stage.
Tonight, he knew, he would look, if for no other reason than to try to replace his last sight of the spot, with the crushed body, and the blood. The blood had got on him, on all of him except the one at the rope, and later he had spent hours in his rooms examining every article of clothing. Bit by bit, over several days, he had painstakingly burned each soiled piece in his little fireplace. He wondered if there would actually be any stain left to see on the floor. The manager had brought in men to swab and sand and revarnish. Probably the only noticeable change would be that