Ladies in Waiting (35 page)

Stanislaus Bambula spied Phil and flashed a smile, a candle in the darkness. He was solemn and solitary by nature, and Phil sometimes believed there was so much on his young mind, he simply could not think with other people around him too often. Nonetheless she knew he was blissfully happy curled up in the welcoming bosom of the Albion family, fed, sheltered, and taught the arcane arts without many questions asked. They knew he was an orphan but never quizzed him about his past. His future was clear. At ten, his was the most natural talent the family had ever seen, and he was destined to be a great magician.

Near him, absently oohing when the ball miraculously ducked under Stan’s hand and righted itself, was the dreamy Fee. While Phil had received her mother’s extravagantly red hair unadulterated, Fee’s hair combined Mum’s improbable scarlet with Dad’s bright gold (“A preposterous complexion for a magician,” Mum always said. “Ought to be raven-haired with black flashing eyes.”), creating a strawberry mist of waves that seemed on the verge of evaporating. All of Fee seemed caught in the middle of a spell, on the verge of transfiguring to another state, as deliquescent as the moment before the dew falls. Her skin was very pale, her blue-gray eyes elsewhere. Her favorite expression was wistful, her favorite activity was love, her favorite utterance a sigh.

She was, as might be imagined, a master of vanishing.

Phil walked deliberately past her sister without acknowledging her, a sign that Fee was to follow her. A moment later Fee joined her in their dressing room.

“Hector’s going to ask me to marry him tonight. After the show, I think.”
Please, please not before it.

“You’ve perfected mind reading?”

Phil chuckled. That was a lark. It was their constant joke that magic was real. How nice that would be, they often said, if all you had to do was mutter a few archaic words instead of practicing a thousand hours in an icy tub learning how to hold your breath for three minutes while wiggling out of handcuffs and a straitjacket.

“No, but he’s clearly nervous about something, and what else could it be? What should I say?”

“If you have to wonder what you’ll say, the answer must be no.” Fee believed in True Love. Phil believed in a Good Match.

“I think I’ll tell him I have to think about it. For two years at least.”

Fee sighed.

“Or maybe when the war’s over. It can’t last much longer.”

Fee covered her elfin ears. “Don’t talk to me about the war, please.” She had never quite grown out of the childhood belief that if she did not acknowledge something, it did not exist. Fee, who could hardly bear to see a worm writhe its last on the pavement, grew faint if she thought about the good, beautiful, kind young people who were killing one another in horrible ways. Because they all would have been good, she said, if people had just left them alone and never told them to fight. What about Hitler? Phil would ask. Well, perhaps he wasn’t raised quite right, Fee would equivocate. There must be good in everyone, somewhere, I know it.

“Maybe I can just avoid him. He’ll be busy with the lights throughout the show, and if he fouls up The Disappearing World, I’ll murder him. There’s no second show today, so afterward it will be hours of congratulation, if it goes well, or commiseration, if it fails, but in any case lots of people and food and drink, and he can’t exactly propose in front of everyone, can he?”

“Wouldn’t that be romantic?” Fee said. “A declaration of his love before all the world?”

“No,” Phil said adamantly, “it would not.” Because the only thing worse than breaking Hector’s heart in private would be breaking it in public.

No, she amended. The worst thing would be to accept him out of embarrassment and obligation and kindness. For she liked Hector so very much, she did not quite know how to tell him that she didn’t love him.

Their part didn’t come until the end, the finale that would have to be particularly grand to overshadow the masterful illusions of their parents and older brother Geoff. Fee appeared onstage early in the act, to be cut in half vertically with an unbearable sound of sawing through her skull, then scurried back to their dressing room to pour herself into her sequined oil-slick costume.

They watched from the wings as Geoff hammered a spectator’s Patek Philippe watch to bits, then resurrected it, polished, better than new. Dad levitated a woman from the audience, while Mum sashayed and gesticulated and flourished. She was really quite a good magician herself after twenty years as an Albion, but she preferred the less demanding role of stage beauty. She was still striking even in natural light, but just old enough that she enjoyed the heavy makeup and feathers and stage lights that worked a glamour to defy her years.

Then the lights went out, and Dad’s voice, forced down an octave, said in a cavernous boom, “Now, for the first time ever, experience the wonder of the cosmos, the primal forces of the universe, as two of the most powerful magicians in England make not just a person, not just a building, but
everything
disappear.”

The lights flashed on blindingly, then dimmed so the two girls in their shining obsidian sheaths were disembodied heads and hands. The audience thought that was a pretty good trick in itself and was always willing to cheer attractive girls. But these girls did not shimmy or undulate or even smile (which had been the hardest thing for Fee in rehearsal). They stared over the audience with kohl-shadowed eyes and spoke in perfect unison in voices of doom, an oracular chorus.

“Imagine . . . everything you know, everything you love, vanishing in the space of an instant.”

They paused, letting the fear begin to build. And it did, even in those people who went to the Hall of Delusion only to scoff and try to spy the mirrors and false bottoms.

Cold air began to flow gently through floor vents, making legs shiver.

The lights grew imperceptibly darker.

“Imagine, the person next to you suddenly gone, the husband, the stranger. Imagine the walls of this theater flying apart into their separate molecules. Imagine this planet as it was at the dawn of time, every atom alone and apart in the void of space.”

Phil and Fee had argued about this for a while, wondering if science would throw the audience off, but Geoff told them it wasn’t proper science anyway and would work, so long as everyone knew that an atom is pretty small and not a thing you’d like your loved ones to be reduced to.

A low percussive heartbeat began to thrum, just within the range of hearing.

“If you were gone too, it wouldn’t matter. You wouldn’t know the world had ended. But today you will be alone, utterly alone, the only living thing left in the vast emptiness of space. Ladies and gentlemen, experience . . .The Disappearing World!”

It almost would have worked without any special effects. The buildup, the public’s perpetual fear of invasion and destruction, combined with a sudden darkness, would have made half the audience scream.

But Phil and Fee had devised a way to do it in full—more than full—light. A blaze erupted from the darkness. Strobes and mirrors at just the right intervals and levels blinded and dazzled and confused so that, for the space of five seconds, though the room was preternaturally bright, no one could see the person in the seat next to him, the very walls of the theater, his hand before his face. The recorded heartbeat crescendoed and was echoed by a terrible high-pitched whine and then a thunder crash that shook the building. Every light went out, and even the people who had come alone grabbed the nearest hand.

Phil and Fee stood together in the blackness, their shoulders just touching.

“What happened?” Fee whispered. “That boom—it wasn’t in the rehearsal. Is Hector improvising?”

One coherent thought emerged from Phil’s confusion:
Maybe that was what Hector was nervous about, and I don’t have to deal with a proposal tonight after all.

Even when the lights failed to come up thirty long seconds later, and the audience wondered if the trick was still going on, Phil could only feel relief.

Then someone began to open doors to the lobby, fire escapes, delivery bays, letting the evening haze float in. Only it was brighter than it should have been, flickering, and came with a choking chalky dust. There was a faint sound like angry buzzing bees, and then . . .

Phil hardly believed those volcanic sounds could be bombs. Nothing made by man could be so powerful. There was another explosion quite close by, then one slightly farther off, and though they retreated in a steady rhythm, the ground continued to shake. She heard a voice from outside cry, “There are hundreds of them!” People started to call for help, from a human, from a god, but they were cut off by a blast that was sound and touch and light and heat, all at once. Another wave of bombs began to fall, right outside the Hall of Delusion.

Phil and Fee could see the ghostly shapes of their audience rushing outside, tripping over one another, showing their best and worst as they pushed grandmothers out of their way or stayed to help people they’d never met.

The sisters had been trained from infancy to let nothing distract them while onstage. They could handle heckling and inappropriate laughter, broken props, torn costumes, and fires that refused to be swallowed. Now, because they were performers and the show must always go on, they stood stupidly on the stage while outside the world disintegrated.

Hector barreled out of the dusty half-light and dragged them underground. Mum and Dad rushed down the aisles, shouting over the confusion that their cellar was a shelter, but only a few people heard them. They were running for the nearest tube station or, more likely, just running.

The city had prepared for bombardment for slightly more than a year, since the day war was declared. The munitions plants and airfields had received steady strikes, and several cities had been hit, but though she carried her gas mask everywhere and nagged her neighbors, with the power of her WVS badge, to install their Anderson shelters in their petunia beds, she never really thought the Germans would bomb civilians in London. One small contingent had dropped a few bombs on the city a month before, but even the most adamant Hun haters admitted that was probably a mistake made by green or disobedient pilots on the way to bomb a port. There was an immediate retaliatory attack on Berlin, and then all had been quiet, aside from the expected attacks on military targets.

Phil staggered down to the cellar, past the mirrored boxes and human-size aquariums, past the chests and presses full of costumes going back generations. Her parents had gathered up a handful of people, mostly those too slow to join the others in their mad career into the inferno, or too world-weary to much care if this was their last day on earth. There was a little boy separated from his mother, and a middle-aged man with his empty sleeve pinned up, sitting on the floor, rocking, remembering the Great War that had taken his arm and half his generation.

Coming slowly out of her shock, Phil looked around the lantern-lit room for those most important to her. Miss Merriall, the wardrobe mistress, was calmly heating water over Sterno for tea. Dad was pacing rather dramatically in his purple star-spangled cape, and Mum was wheeling all of the standing mirrors into an alcove where they wouldn’t cause deadly shards if they shattered. Hector quivered in a tension of fury like a setter at point, spots of pink on his pale cheeks, looking as if he desperately wanted to punch someone but didn’t know who, or how. Geoff was passing around spare gas masks . . .

“Where’s Stan?” Phil shouted. The shriek and boom of the bombs was muffled now. Even the end of the world couldn’t last forever.

“He was outside during the performance,” Fee said, her eyes widening. “You know how he hates watching the shows.”

Almost before Fee had finished, Phil was dashing past her family and up the stairs. Fee was right: though Stan enjoyed quiet training, he could never stand to watch the magic onstage before an audience. No one knew quite why, but when the show started, he would either wait outside the theater, letting his crystal ball run like a pet over his body, or more likely, take a walk down to the nearby Thames.

Phil opened the stage door and entered the disappearing world.

The Luftwaffe didn’t bother using flashing strobes where a blazing holocaust of incendiary bombs would do. They created terror not with chill breezes and subtle sound effects but with craters and corpses, screaming and explosions. And they removed the world Phil knew not with trickery and illusion but with the brute force of physics, leveling building after building, reducing the world inexorably to atoms.

She could hear bombs falling somewhere far away, but for the moment there were no planes overhead. The theater had been spared, but the dress store three buildings away had suffered a direct hit and was utterly gone. The café beside it was rubble, and the bookstore next door was still standing but with one wall blown off and the roof crumbling. Down the road was a deep pit with a charred bus dangling on its lip, and the entire row of buildings across the street was on fire. Farther away she could see masonry skeletons of buildings that had been gutted by the concussive force.

“Stan!” she screamed, but everyone was screaming for someone.

Geoff came up behind her. “Phil, don’t be a fool. There might be more bombers on the way.”

“Stan was out here. He always walked by the candy store.” It too was engulfed, exuding a sickening burnt-sugar smell. “It’s gone. He’s gone!”

She staggered into the chaos, to tear through rubble looking for Stan, to weep helpless tears and curse the Germans when a second wave of bombers came in after nightfall, following the trail of fire across London they’d blazed earlier.

All around London, millions of citizens were rallying. Their fear fled quickly, replaced by anger and then at last by something far more useful: grim, stubborn determination, a rocklike resolution to endure.

Soon Phil’s family joined her on their devastated street, and the Albions began to account for the fallen and treat the survivors. Fee found Phil a few hours later with rills of tear tracks running down her sooty face, sitting on a curb, exhausted with work and weeping.