The Spirit Cabinet Read online

  Edgar Biggs McGehee, the grandfather of the current owner, appeared almost immediately. He had made an incredible fortune in the oil fields, but the only thing that engaged his interest was conjuring and prestidigitation. He considered himself one of the great amateurs, although his grandson Eddie clearly recalled detecting, even at the age of five, every sleight of hand the old man attempted. Eddie quickly learned to exclaim with great glee, no matter which card was presented as the one he’d chosen. And it was a matter of McGehee family legend that Edgar Biggs only stopped trying to saw his wife in half when someone noticed blood dripping from the cabinet (made in 1878 by the great Harry Kellar and sold to Edgar Biggs by Houdini) onto the floor.

  The actual nuts and bolts of the McGehee/Weiss agreement have never been known but they were hammered out during one of Houdini’s performances. Prior to the meeting, Houdini had been handcuffed and manacled. Chains were draped over his shoulders; they somehow had the appearance of a ceremonial mantle. Houdini was placed in a large wooden box, which was hammered shut and it too wreathed in chains. Then the audience stared at the box for about an hour, an hour during which there was no apparent activity on stage. Finally, Houdini reappeared, dripping with sweat and dangling the chains from his hands like the severed heads of dragons. The chains about the wooden box remained unmolested, mysteriously mute.

  During that hour Edgar Biggs had been ushered backstage, where he found Houdini sitting calmly in a rocking chair, sipping a cup of tea with lemon. Houdini dismissed his many assistants with a regal gesturing of his thick fingers and indicated a small stool where McGehee might sit. The men began to talk in whispers. They could hear the audience beyond, stirring nervously in their seats.

  Houdini ended up selling perhaps a third of his collection. What remained was given to the Library of Congress after his death. The severance, the McGehee Collection, was taken to Nevada, where Edgar Biggs maintained a residence about fifty miles south of Las Vegas—which didn’t exist in any substantial way back then—on the fringes of the Mojave Desert. It was a very modest residence for a multi-billionaire, a mud-covered hovel surrounded by three tilted outbuildings. For the first few years, Edgar Biggs would visit the Collection only occasionally, but the frequency and duration of his visits increased as he grew older. In his last days, Edgar Biggs dwelt in the desert continually. The few times he was seen, he was wearing only what appeared to be an enormous diaper. He had shaved all the hair from his head, except for a topknot, a spray of gossamer filament that stood bolt upright. He was so gaunt that his bones threatened to rip through his paper-thin skin with every movement.

  After Edgar Bigg’s death, his son, Edgar Biggs McGehee, Jr. (“Ed,” he called himself, being a no-nonsense-type fellow), moved the Collection to Las Vegas proper, soon after the city had exploded upon the sands. He stored the books and pieces in a warehouse, where they were protected from the elements; other than that Ed proved to be an indifferent administrator, only mentioning the Collection around tax time, when it served to open a sizable loophole. (His indifference might have had something to do with the fact that it was Ed, a doting teenage son, who first noticed the blood dripping from Kellar’s old cabinet and realized his mother’s anguished screams were not as stagey as they sounded.) When Ed died, his son, Eddie, assumed control. He located—in the George, a run-down theatre where the ghosts of failed tragedians made the building groan and whimper—both a home and a curator. Preston the Magnificent, Jr., spent four years rummaging, cataloguing—the happiest years of his life—and when he was finished, Eddie had announced his intention of placing the McGehee Collection up for auction.

  “I’m surprised you guys came,” Preston said to the four people gathered around him outside the George, seeing how far he could push a bluff. “This is real boring stuff. Collectors’ stuff. Some of the books are pretty damn dry. Very academic.” He pronounced the last word with pompous precision. He still clung to the hope that a university would purchase the Collection, stick it in some cobwebbed storage room where it would be forgotten over time. Preston knew it was folly to imagine that universities had anywhere near the financial resources of these guys. Still, he’d fired off letters, listing the books and the pieces, making grand statements about the historical significance, though he doubted any university representative would show up. He had more faith in the arrival of an eccentric billionaire. Such creatures inhabited the deserts surrounding Las Vegas, after all. Some senile fart pumped full of monkey-gland juice could cart the Collection home—Preston wouldn’t mind that so much. The only other satisfactory outcome to this whole thing—and in many ways the likeliest—would be for the earth to open up and swallow the auction hall and everyone in it.

  “Oh, Preston,” said Jurgen Schubert, “it is not a surprise that I am interest in this.” Jurgen’s skull was square and all of his features oddly rectangular, as though he’d been designed by an architect, planned out on blue drafting paper. His hair was made up of tight golden fiddleheads, a dense mat of curls that he brushed forward so that it draped evenly over his brow like a bedspread. He was deeply tanned, but, even so, his eyelids seemed much darker than the rest of his face, in a bruised, unhealthy way. “I am telling you a story.”

  “Hoo boy!” called out Rudolfo eagerly, clapping his hands together. “Tell us this story.” This was how they behaved on television shows, Jurgen doing most of the talking, Rudolfo reduced to over-enthusiastic responses and exhortations, even though Rudolfo’s English was much better than Jurgen’s.

  “I am hearing about a book in bookshop,” said Jurgen. “It is cost twenty Deutschmark.”

  “Which,” put in Rudolfo, “is a lot.”

  “Ja, ja. Es war sehr teuer.”

  “So vot did you do, Jurgen?”

  “I work at docks. I am eleven years old. But I am getting up every Saturday and Sunday at three in the morning and go to the docks in Bremerhaven, and I am lift with the men huge craters.”

  “Hold on,” said Rudolfo loudly, laying a hand on his partner’s shoulder. “You are making a mistake, my friend.”

  “Was?”

  “Not craters. Crates.”

  Jurgen didn’t bother to correct himself, but turned back to Preston and said, “Four hours on my old bicycle to Bremerhaven. Two hours to go, two hours to come home. Every weekend. So after many weeks, I have money. I buy the book. You know what book was?”

  Preston shrugged.

  “The Secrets of Magic Revealed,” said Jurgen. “By your father. Preston the Magnificent.”

  “Hoo boy!” shouted Rudolfo.

  “So, it is not so a very big deal for Rudolfo and I to get into our very long limousine and tell Jimmy the driver to come here. So I don’t know why you are surprise.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Preston, “I don’t know why I’m surprised either.”

  “That was my first book, too,” said Kaz.

  At first Preston thought this was just more evidence of Kaz’s absurdly competitive nature, but he quickly decided otherwise. The Secrets of Magic Revealed was everybody’s first book. Judging from the magicians who worked many of the smaller rooms, it was some guys’ only book. A couple of times Preston had heard patter, taken word for word, from those pages, silly stuff that had been laughable when his father had said it. At least, Preston always found it laughable. His father, ornately moustached, his hair greased and moulded into an unlikely peaked coiffure, seemed to get away with it. “For just as our telluric orb is a moonlet of mighty Sol,” Preston the Magnificent would say, aiming a finger at the little rubber globe that circled his head, “so we espy here testament to consonance and concinnity!” Magicians still performed the illusion and they still said essentially the same crap, the only difference being the statuesque near-naked women standing behind them, guilelessly gesturing at the revolving sphere.

  “I would have been five, six,” Kaz continued. He pulled off his thick spectacles and chewed on one arm, both to affect a more thoughtful air and to keep Miranda at a fuzzy d
istance, to break her spell. “I was performing the big illusions by the time I was seven. The close-up stuff took longer. I didn’t master coins until I was nine.” This, too, thought Preston, was talk-show behaviour, Kaz reciting his personal history, at least the one-pager used by his army of publicists. It was all Kaz was ever asked about and it was the only information he ever gave, the meagre outline of a strange life. Kaz was the youngest person ever admitted to the Inner Circle of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and given the status of Grand Wizard. It was true, Preston would admit, that the kid was sensational. His show-stopper was “The Mannequin,” a classy little bit of animation involving a dressmaker’s form that comes to life and follows the young Kaz around the stage. The kid would appear unmindful of his admirer, going about his business, turning away by chance whenever the ardent dummy tried to present herself.

  “That was good,” said Preston suddenly, alarming even himself. “The Mannequin. You still do that?”

  “Are you crazy?” Kaz said loudly, driving everyone backwards with a gust of rancid breath, including the huge albino leopard. “I haven’t done that shit since I was sixteen.”

  Preston the Adequate sighed, and a single teardrop rolled out, getting lost in the grey folds piled up beneath his left eye. Preston was a somewhat leaky man, often burdened by a runny nose, watery eyes and even oozing beads of white stuff from the pores of his face. “Okay, okay,” he muttered. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Chapter Two

  Miranda led Rudolfo and Jurgen to their seats. At the end of the row, she gesticulated in a showy manner, aiming long index fingers in graceful unison. Jurgen went in first, followed by Miranda, with Rudolfo claiming the end so Samson could lie down in the aisle. The old beast immediately did so, collapsing and allowing his snout to hit the ground, even though the red carpet was redolent of the thousands of feet that had smoothed its nap. Kaz chose to sit closer to the front, seeking out some young boys and elderly women who had attended the auction only because of the prospect of spotting Kaz. He responded to their subdued applause in grand fashion, raising his long crooked arms into the air, throwing his pelvis back and forth a couple of times. Rudolfo leant over, digging an elbow into Miranda’s side. “What a asshole,” he whispered.

  She nodded, although she wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong. Kaz was only doing what his fans expected of him. She had a notion to point this out to Rudolfo, but the atmosphere inside the hall was uncomfortably churchlike. The people sat staring rigidly forward, their hands folded into pious little wedges. Instead of speaking, Miranda concentrated on crossing one long leg over the other without kicking the seat of the woman in front of her.

  Preston the Adequate stood near the back of the theatre, clinging to the jambs of the main doors as if preparing to make a hasty exit.

  The auctioneer, whose face was elongated and peanut-shaped, stepped out from behind the black velvet curtain that skirted the stage. He approached the wooden lectern, brought his gavel down softly and announced, “The McGehee family has requested that the Collection be auctioned not by lot but in its entirety.”

  The auctioneer allowed for a short silence in which this statement could sink in, a silence that was ruined by a nightmarish sound, something half fart and half death rattle. Just as the terrifying wake settled, the sound came again, and people turned and stared, realizing it was the snoring of the slumbering Samson. Rudolfo beamed at them brilliantly and spoke in a voice far too loud. “Oh, ja, this is time for his nawp.”

  “Well,” said the auctioneer, pinching his face into the smallest of smiles, “let’s try to hurry things up so as not to disturb him too much.”

  The people laughed. Rudolfo’s hairless skin was suffused momentarily with red, which Rudolfo willed away by concentrating not on his anger, but rather on what he could learn from this. Why hadn’t they laughed at what he had said? Why was it funny, what the man had said? More to the point, could he and Jurgen use it in the Show?

  “This then …” the auctioneer waved his hand at the black velvet curtain behind him as the halves pulled apart in a herky-jerky way, “… is the Collection.”

  Apparently Preston the Adequate’s duties as curator had not extended to cleaning or dusting. The books were stacked in piles three and four feet high, and cobwebs spanned the distances between. Flies hovered over top and little worms, chubby with pulp, tumbled from between the book covers. Vermin scurried for cover as the curtains waltzed apart, several mice and one large rat. Only Samson, lifting an eyebrow wearily and pulling his left eye open, noticed the rat, which was filthy and vicious-looking.

  The books themselves were for the most part enormously thick, a four-foot-high stack containing perhaps only twelve or thirteen volumes. The pages were ragged, the edges blackened and devoured by old air. Smaller books littered the ground between the stacks—medieval chapbooks, squares of parchment laced together by lengths of crude hemp. There were even one or two brown and flaky cylindrical objects that were surely papyrus scrolls.

  Rudolfo was paying absolutely no attention. He was petting Samson absent-mindedly because the albino leopard’s head had jerked up suddenly, as though the beast had been startled or frightened, and even now Rudolfo could sense a small trembling somewhere deep in the animal’s being. Rudolfo crossed his legs. He kicked the off-puttingly large bottom in the seat ahead, and a man spun around. Seeing that it was Rudolfo, this man (who came from Wisconsin and was quite active in amateur magicians’ circles, calling himself The Mystifying Henry) smiled politely and mouthed the word sorry.

  The stacks of books reached almost to the back wall, so some of the Collection was draped in gloom and shadow. This was the paraphernalia, the physical accessories of conjurers long dead. There were Chinese rings, green with tarnish, and small chipped china cups emblazoned with ornate suns, smiling faces etched inside the horns of flame. There were rusty chains and popped handcuffs, the locking mechanisms now filled with dust and spider eggs. There was the infamous Kellar woman-in-half rig, and what looked like a cheaply made steamer trunk, a crate of dried wood contained by straps of faded, disintegrated leather. There was also an automaton, a fat mechanical man who sat awkwardly cross-legged, his hands in the air, a fatuous smile painted on his lacquered face.

  (These last two pieces had caused quite a bit of haggling and bickering between McGehee and Harry Houdini at the famous backstage negotiations. It is not that McGehee wanted them and Houdini demurred; rather, Houdini insisted they be part of the deal. McGehee restated his affection for the books. Houdini said that the books themselves were worthless and threw in the Substitution Box, which he and Bess had used in their famous act “Metamorphosis,” as well as the automaton, constructed in 1767 and named “Moon.”)

  Of all the pieces, the most obtrusive (and the one that provoked the most intense discussion between McGehee and Houdini, a discussion involving specific dates many years in the future) was what appeared to be an oversized wardrobe, easily ten feet high and seven feet across. All of its angles seemed too great, obtuse; if you studied the individual corners it seemed unlikely that the box could fit together as a whole. The piece had double doors, and one had fallen open. Inside there seemed to be only a single shelf, fitted at an oddly low level.

  The box was made from light, unfinished wood, whorly with grain. Small pieces had been taken out of it; bits of the door had been removed as if with a cookie cutter, leaving holes shaped like crescent moons.

  Jurgen glanced at the small booklet he held in his hands—he couldn’t quite remember where he’d gotten it—and allowed it to fall open. It spread at the pages numbered eight and nine. His eyes were drawn toward a large block of writing: “Number 112,” Jurgen read, “The Davenport Spirit Cabinet.”

  The Davenports—Ira and William—were two young men from Buffalo, New York, who claimed to be in touch with the spiritual realm. This was late in the nineteenth century, when people were inclined to believe such things. At any rate, the Davenports seemed
to be able to prove their claim, for the brothers would be bound, hand and foot, and placed inside this cabinet. The Spirit Cabinet was always most certainly empty; sometimes the Davenport Brothers were naked as well, so that there could be no question of trickery. The doors of the Spirit Cabinet would be shut. Moments later, noises would commence, strange rappings, hollow knockings. Next would come musical sounds, as from trumpets and plucked strings, and then melodies, pieces of songs sung by the boys who had died in the War between the States. Then, from the crescent-shaped holes in the doors came animals, a serpent slithering from one, a dove, wet and glistening, from another.

  The doors to the Spirit Cabinet could be (and were) thrown open at any time during this, and Ira and William would be seen sitting on the bench, unmoving, still bound hand and foot.

  At number 113 in Preston’s catalogue there was listed a book: Magie et physique amusante, written by the great French conjuror Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. It gave a very detailed account of how the Davenports perpetrated their fraud. When being bound, for example, the brothers would insist that each length of rope be doubled. People always complied, thinking this made it twice as strong, little realizing that, in fact, the doubling made knots and wrappings essentially useless, the rope acting against, undoing, itself. Once inside the Spirit Cabinet, Ira and William merely threw off the ropes, produced objects through various, and not very ingenious, ways. (Those interested might consult another seminal French work, La Magie blanche dévoilée, written by Henri DeCremps and listed in the programme at number 312.)