The Portable Door (1987) (33 page)

Wonderful
, he thought,
that’s screwed it up even worse. Now she’s going to be really pissed off with him and me too
. “Right,” she said. “So I’ve got to be supportive and keep out of the way and not speak till I’m spoken to, like—like a good little
wife
.” She shook her head so ferociously it was a miracle she didn’t unscrew her neck. “That’s not—”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Paul interrupted desperately. “That’s not at all what I meant.” (
And what
did
I mean, Mister Wise Guy?
) “What I meant was,” he went on, “surely it’s precisely those things that you—well, that you really like about him, that makes him such a good, um, potter.”

“Ceramic artist.”

“Right. That too. So what I’m saying is, if he doesn’t stay true to himself, keep faith with his art, all that stuff; well, he wouldn’t be the person you, um, really like, he’d be somebody else. I mean, if he suddenly decided to give up being a pot—being a performance ceramic artist, just because it was taking up so much of his time, and instead of doing that he—oh, I don’t know, got a job in the library or on a building site or something. Then he’d be someone completely different, and—”

Mercifully, she interrupted. “I see what you mean,” she said. (Paul was glad to hear that one of them did.) “So you think that really I’m the one being selfish, because I’m trying to make him into someone he isn’t just because I want him to be the way I want him to be, instead of wanting him the way he is, which is why I wanted him in the first place?”

Paul took a deep breath. “Yes,” he said.

“Oh.”

Just as Paul was beginning to despair, Mr Wells showed up; and he at least had the common courtesy to stick to the script. Once they were in the minibus, there was obviously less scope for deviation from the

True Way, although Paul noted with a certain degree of disgust that this time around, Sophie carried on reading
Slipware Against Franco
for a full twenty minutes. In due course, he felt his eyes getting tired; he closed them and fell asleep, but if he repeated the dream, he wasn’t aware of it when he woke up. Of the urge to use the portable door there was no sign. Instead, he lolled back in his seat and tried to think happy thoughts. He failed.

He’d fallen asleep again when they finally arrived, and Sophie woke him up with a gentle kick to the ankle. He jumped up and nearly banged his head on the bus roof.

“We’re here,” Mr Wells announced. “Now, I should have briefed you on what we’re going to be doing, but it must’ve slipped my mind. Doesn’t matter, it’s all very straightforward. Just keep quiet and do whatever I tell you to. You can both manage that, I’m sure.”

They climbed out of the van into an open field. Some way off was a big white tent. There were children running about, dozens of them, while serious-looking men in suits hung around in small groups sipping wine and talking gravely, and harassed women in hats tried to keep the kids from causing injury to themselves and others.

“Children’s party,” Mr Wells explained under his breath, as they walked towards the tent. Sophie was scowling. “What are we doing here, then?” she asked.

“We’re the magic show,” Mr Wells replied.

Sophie stopped dead. “Magic show? You mean conjuring tricks and stuff?”

Mr Wells looked annoyed. “Well, of course. That’s what I am, a magician.”

“Oh.”

A very large fat man in a double-breasted grey suit, presumably the host, intercepted Mr Wells and shook his hand as though pumping water. Mr Wells smiled affably and introduced them as his assistants, whereupon the host pointed to a smaller tent, where they could get changed. Paul was thinking,
Hang on;
but of course, it made sense. Magic shows; magic. Rabbits out of hats, doves out of white silk handkerchieves, your card was the seven of clubs. And that, apparently, was all there was to it, after all.

“Your costumes,” Mr Wells said, as they reached the changing tent, “are in that suitcase.”

At the word costumes, Sophie gave him a look that would’ve cleaned barnacles off the hull of an oil tanker; but if she’d been anticipating something involving lurex and long spangly tights, she was worrying unnecessarily. The costumes turned out to be long grey robes, what the well-dressed monk was wearing, and they slipped on over their ordinary clothes without any trouble. Mr Wells’s version came with a deep, mysterious hood that made him look like Emperor Palpatine’s no-good elder brother, and he also had a genuine black-with-white-tips magic wand. The rest of the luggage was full of props—interlocking brass rings, white silk squares, curiously shaped spring-loaded boxes that strapped on under the forearm, brightly-coloured glass balls, several packs of playing cards, a bunch of what looked like carpentry stuff and four disconcertingly real, sharp Japanese swords. The suitcase itself expanded somehow into a combination trestle table and trunk, by virtue of several logic-defying hinged and folded panels. They lugged all the gear across to the main tent, which was empty apart from a few bored-looking men setting out chairs. There was a stage at one end, with a microphone stand and a couple of folding screens.

Setting up all the gadgetry took a long time. Mr Wells wasn’t terribly good at explaining what he wanted them to do, which was unfortunate given that neither of them had a clue what was supposed to go where, or how it was meant to work. They’d only just finished when the children started trooping in.

Small children always made Paul nervous, and this lot were worse than most. They chattered and pulled faces and threw things, mostly sausage rolls and cake shrapnel, quite a lot of which missed its intended targets and found its way up onto the stage. Mr Wells, however, didn’t seem the slightest bit fazed by the unruliness of the mob; he confronted them like a Roman emperor receiving the salute from a troupe of gladiators, and when he tapped twice against the trunk with his wand, the whole lot of them immediately stopped talking, sat up straight and gazed at him expectantly. Then he began his act.

Paul had never liked conjuring shows much when he’d been a kid; he couldn’t ever see the point, since it was always blindingly obvious (to him at least) how the tricks were done. Maybe this was just because all the shows he’d ever watched had been low-budget cheapskate affairs. Mr Wells, however, was in a different class. Too dignified to bother with inanely cheerful patter, he didn’t say a word apart from the occasional soft grunt when he asked Paul or Sophie to hold something for him or pass him some item of equipment. As the show wore on, and Paul managed to follow orders without screwing the whole thing up through ignorance or carelessness, he realised that Mr Wells was really very good indeed. That was, of course, only to be expected. Clearly the people who’d hired them were disgustingly rich, enough so that they could afford to employ the very best, which was what Mr Wells appeared to be. Paul found himself watching with rapt attention, but this time he had no idea how Mr Wells managed to pull off his rather astonishing stunts. If he hadn’t seen all the paraphernalia beforehand, he could quite easily have believed that it really was all done by supernatural influence (though why anybody with mysterious superhuman powers should choose to fritter them away on transfiguring gerbils into roller-skates and pulling the flags of all the EU member states out of a sealed biscuit jar was just another mystery).

At least he didn’t have to wait too long to find out what the swords were for. He was ordered to climb inside the trunk (actually, it was huge in there; you could’ve parked a Morris Minor in the front compartment alone) and keep still. Then the lid closed, and Paul was left huddled up on all fours, feeling his legs go to sleep. After he’d been in there for perhaps a full minute, he felt something tickle the side of his neck, followed by a similar feeling in the small of his back. He couldn’t shift round to see what it was, because of the excruciating pins and needles he was getting, but a moment later, as he looked up at the trunk roof, he was horrified to see the sharp chisel point of one of the swords coming straight at him. At the very last moment before the blade rammed in straight between his eyes, it appeared to turn first translucent, then invisible, and that appeared to be that. To judge by the muffled thunder going on outside, the kids were enjoying it, at any rate.

Then he heard Mr Wells telling him to shuffle backwards out of the box, so he did that, the discomfort in his legs having eased a bit, and found himself squatting on his heels behind one of the folding screens. He did his best to keep perfectly still.

“And now for my last trick,” Mr Wells was saying, “I shall saw a lady in half. Now I’ll need a volunteer from our audience. You, perhaps, miss? Yes, you in the front row.”

Paul wriggled round so he could see what was going on through a small tear in the screen. A twentysomethingish blonde in a power business suit with an illegally short skirt was getting up out of her seat in the front row, where she’d been sitting next to the host on his left. Something told Paul that she was the host’s personal assistant, and that her filing skills and telephone manner weren’t the only reasons she’d got the job. She didn’t seem too pleased about volunteering, in fact she was sharing out skin-blistering glares between the host and Mr Wells; but she was out of her chair and being steered towards the trunk, which had somehow evolved into a variety of free-floating coffin, hovering about three feet off the ground. Mr Wells lifted the coffin lid and she scrambled inside, although hampered rather in her movements by the tightness of her skirt. Then Mr Wells closed the lid and picked up a large Stanley hardpoint saw.

Paul caught sight of the host’s face, which seemed rather strained for some reason; then Mr Wells began to saw. The noise he made was rather horrible, and he appeared to be putting a great deal of effort into it. From where he crouched, Paul could distinctly see sawdust floating down to the ground. Not a peep out of the kids, and Paul could understand why. The whole thing was distinctly riveting, even though everybody in the world knew how the trick was done these days.

Mr Wells stopped sawing and rested for a moment, wiping his forehead on the back of his sleeve (nice touch, Paul had to admit). Then he laid his hands on either side of the saw-cut and gently pushed, and the two halves of the coffin drifted apart. Paul could see the girl’s head sticking out of one end, and her four-inch stilettos waggling feebly up and down out of the other. Then Mr Wells stepped forward, said, “Thank you, you’ve been a wonderful audience,” swept low in a grandiose bow, and turned to leave the stage.

It was at that moment that Paul realised it wasn’t a trick.

Maybe it was something in the way the girl’s head had slumped forward, or maybe he was just getting more perceptive where these matters were concerned. He craned his neck to see, but there wasn’t any blood in with the sawdust, no bits of intestine hanging out from the end of the box. Even so.

Apparently the host had got the message too; he jumped up, his mouth wide open, but before he could make a sound, Mr Wells half-turned and beckoned. The host followed Mr Wells to the back of the stage, behind the other screen. The audience was just starting to murmur. The girl’s heels were perfectly still now, like Christmas turkeys hanging up in a butcher’s window.

“What the hell—?” Paul heard the host say in a hoarse whisper, but Mr Wells held up his hand.

“I said I’d saw her in half,” he said, in a quiet, reasonable voice. “I never said anything about putting her back together again.”

The host called Mr Wells a bastard. Mr Wells didn’t seem inclined to deny it. In fact, he smiled.

“Isn’t it Von Clausewitz who defines bastardry as the art of negotiation by other means?” he said, with a mild grin. “Now, about my client’s takeover bid for your client’s company.”

The audience was starting to get restless; he could hear voices, sounding worried. Someone laughed, but there was an edge to it. “Your client?” the host said.

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Oh, so you’re—?”

“Yes. Always nice to put a face to the name, isn’t it?”

“But—”

“Fond of her, aren’t you?”

About a second of dead silence. “All right,” said the host. “What’ve I got to do?”

“Just sign here.” Mr Wells produced a sheet of paper from inside his gown. “You can borrow my pen if you like.”

After that, the host went back to his seat; he was as white as a sheet, and even from where he was, Paul could see he was shaking. Then Mr Wells came out from behind the screen and, with a graceful flourish, he slid the two halves of the coffin back together again and lifted the lid. The girl’s head moved, she groaned; and Mr Wells reached out his hand and helped her to her feet.

For a single heartbeat, there was total silence. Then the audience started to clap; the girl looked round, as if she hadn’t known they were there. Mr Wells bowed again, with a good deal of exaggerated business, swirling the hem of his gown. The girl tottered back to her place in the front row and sat down.

That seemed to be that.

Mr Wells nodded to Paul, and he guessed he was supposed to help with dismantling the gear. The audience was getting up, filing out of the tent. Even the children seemed subdued, as if they knew they’d seen something odd, but didn’t know what exactly. The girl left with the rest of the crowd; the host stayed on for a moment or so, staring up at Mr Wells as he folded up the coffin and turned it back into a suitcase. Then he left too.

“Time we were on our way, I think,” Mr Wells said, when the three of them were alone in the tent. “Best not to hang around when you’ve pulled off a good deal.” He seemed almost absurdly cheerful, like a favourite uncle at Christmas. “Right, is that the lot? Splendid. We didn’t leave anything in the other tent, did we?” He pulled his robes off and dumped them unfolded in the suitcase. “You two can change in the bus, to save time. Come on.”

A minute or so later they were back in the minibus, and the driver was starting up the engine. Mr Wells flopped into his comfy chair; Paul could see he’d been sweating. “What’s the time?” Mr Wells asked, and then answered his own question. “Quarter past twelve, splendid. We’ll stop for lunch on the way back, firm’s treat. Well, that all went very smoothly. I thought it would, but you can never be sure.”