The Prestige

I thought quickly. Adam Wilson and Hester were both backstage, and would have to deal with the emergency there behind the curtain. I was alive, strong and in full possession of my senses. I realized it was my responsibility to get to the backstage area, and confront Borden once and for all.

I let myself out of the loge, hurried along the corridor, then took the stairs at a run. I passed one of the female attendants. I skidded to a halt in front of her, and said as urgently as I could, 'Have you seen anyone trying to leave the theatre?'

My voice came out as a harsh whisper!

The woman, staring straight at me, screamed in horror. I stood there helplessly for a moment, deafened by the terrible yell she was emitting. She drew breath, her eyes popping and rolling, then she screamed again! I realized I was wasting time, so I laid my hand on her arm to push her gently to one side. My hand sank into the flesh of her arm!

She had collapsed on the steps, shuddering and moaning, as I reached the bottom of the stairs and found the door to the backstage area. I shoved it open, recoiling as once again I felt my hands and arms pushing into the wood. I was preoccupied with the urgent need to find Borden, and had no time to pay much attention.

Without noticing me, Adam Wilson ran past from his position at the back of the set; I called after him but he heard me no more than he had seen me. I paused for a moment, trying to think clearly about where Borden was most likely to have been. He had somehow interrupted the supply of electricity to the apparatus, and this could only mean that he had gained access to the sub-stage mezzanine. Wilson and I had connected everything up to the terminal the management had newly installed in the basement.

I found the stairs leading down, but as I went on to the top step I heard the sound of feet running heavily towards me, and in a moment Borden himself appeared. He was still wearing his ridiculous country-bumpkin clothes and greasepaint. He took the steps two at a time. I froze. When he was no more than five feet away from me he looked up to see where he was going. He saw me instead! Once again, I witnessed the look of terror that had distorted the features of the female attendant. Borden's momentum carried him towards me, but his face was contorted with shock and he stretched out his arms defensively in front of him. Almost at once we collided.

We sprawled together, and fell heavily on the stone floor of the corridor. He was briefly on top of me, but I was able to slide out. I reached towards him.

'Stay away from me!' he cried, and crouching forward, stumbling and tripping, he scrambled away.

I dived at him, got my hand around his ankle, but he slipped it from my grasp. He was bellowing wordlessly with fear.

I shouted at him, 'Borden, we must stop this dangerous feud!', but once again my voice came out hoarsely and inaudibly, more breath than tone.

'I didn't mean it!' he cried.

He was on his feet now and getting away from me, still looking back at me with an expression of dread. I gave up the struggle, and let him flee.

ii

After that night I returned to London, where I lived for the next ten months, by my own choice and decision, in a half-world.

The accident in the Tesla apparatus had fundamentally affected my body and soul by placing them in opposition to each other. Physically, I had been rendered into a ghost of my former self. I lived, breathed, ate, passed bodily waste, heard and saw, felt warm and cold, but I was physically a wraith. In a bright light, if you did not look too closely at me, I appeared more or less normal, if somewhat wan of aspect. When the weather was overcast, or I was in an artificially lit room after nightfall, I took on the appearance of a spectre. I could be seen but also seen through . My outline remained, and if people looked hard enough at me they could make out my face, my clothes, and so on, but I was to most people a hideous vision of the ghostly underworld. The female attendant and Borden had both reacted as if they had seen a ghost, and indeed they had. I quickly learned that if I let myself be noticed in these circumstances, I not only terrorized most of the people whom I encountered, but I put myself in some danger too. People react unpredictably when frightened, and once or twice strangers hurled objects at me, as if to ward me off. One of these missiles was a lighted oil-lamp, and it nearly caught me. As a rule I therefore stayed out of sight when I could.

But against this my mind suddenly felt liberated from the constraints of the body. I was always alert, fast- thinking, positive, in ways I had only ever glimpsed in myself before. One of the paradoxes this produced was that I usually felt strong and capable, whereas the reality was that I was unable to tackle most physical tasks. I had to learn to hold objects like pens and utensils, for example, because a careless grip on something would usually make it slip away from me.

It was a frustrating and morbid situation in which to find myself, and for much of the time my new mental energy was directed as pure loathing and fear at whichever of the two Bordens had attacked me. He continued to sap my mental energy, just as his action had sapped my physical being. I had become to all intents and purposes invisible to the world, as good as dead.

iii

It did not take me long to discover that I could be visible or invisible as I chose.

If I moved after dusk, and I wore the stage clothes I had been in during the performance, I could go almost anywhere unseen. If I wanted to move normally then I wore other clothes, and used greasepaint to give my features some solidity. It was not a perfect simulation; my eyes had a disconcertingly hollow look, and once a man in a dimly lit omnibus loudly drew attention to the gap that had inexplicably appeared between my sleeve and my glove, and I had to make a quick departure.

Money, food, accommodation presented no problems to me. Either I took what I wanted when in the invisible state, or I paid for what I needed. Such concerns were trivial.

My real consideration was the well-being of my prestige.

I learned from a newspaper report that my fleeting glimpse of the stage had completely misled me. The report stated that The Great Danton had suffered injuries during a performance in Lowestoft, that he had been forced to cancel future engagements, but was resting at home and expected to return to the stage in due course.

I was relieved to hear it, but greatly surprised! What I had glimpsed as the curtains came down was what I assumed was my own prestige, frozen in the half-dead, half-live condition I called 'prestigious’. The prestige is the source body in the transportation, left behind in the Tesla apparatus, as if dead. Concealing and disposing of these prestigious bodies was the single greatest problem I had had to solve before I could present the illusion to the public.

With this news about ill-health and cancelled engagements I realized something different had happened that night. The transportation had been only partial, and I was the sorry result. Most of me had remained behind.

Both I and my prestige were much reduced by Borden's intervention. We each had problems to cope with. I was in a wraithlike condition, my prestige was in debilitated health. While he had corporeality and freedom of movement in the world, from the moment of the accident he was doomed to die; meanwhile, I had been condemned to a life in the shadows, but my health was intact.

In July, two months after Lowestoft, and while I was still coming to terms with the disaster, my prestige apparently decided of his own accord to bring forward the death of Rupert Angier. It was exactly what I would have done in his position; the moment I thought this I realized that he was me. It was the first time we had reached an identical decision separately, and my first intimation that although we existed separately we were emotionally but one person.

Soon after, my prestige returned to Caldlow House to take up the inheritance; again, this is what I would have done.

I, though, remained in London for the time being. I had macabre business to attend to, and I wanted to conduct it in secret with no risk of what I intended to do attaching itself to the Colderdale name.

In short, I had decided that Borden, finally, must be dealt with. I planned to murder him, or, more exactly, to murder one of the two. His secret double life made murder a practicable revenge: he had interfered with the official records that revealed the existence of twins, and had lived his life with one half of himself concealed. Killing one of the brothers would put an end to his deception, and would for my purposes be as satisfying and effective as