Smoke And Mirrors

The Third Room

went up for a long way into the darkness. The original ceiling had been removed at some time in the past, and the new ceiling was the roof of the empty warehouse far above us. The room buzzed at the corners of vision with the blue-purple of ultraviolet light. Teeth and shirts and flecks of lint began to glow in the darkness. A low; throbbing music began. We looked up to see, high above us, a skeleton, an alien, a werewolf and an angel. Their costumes fluoresced in the UV, and they glowed like old dreams high above us, on trapezes. They swung back and forth, in time with the music, and then, as one, they let go and tumbled down toward us.

We gasped, but before they reached us they bounced on the air, and rose up again, like yo-yos, and clambered back on their trapezes. We realised that they were attached to the roof by rubber cords, invisible in the darkness, and they bounced and dove and swam through the air above us while we clapped and gasped and watched them in happy silence.

was little more than a corridor: the ceiling was low, and the Ringmaster strutted into the audience and picked two people out of the crowd-the stocky woman, and a tall black man wearing a sheepskin coat and tan gloves, pulled them up in front of us. He announced that he would be demonstrating his hypnotic powers. He made a couple of passes in the air, and rejected the stocky woman. Then he asked the man to step up onto a box.

"It's a set-up," muttered Jane. "He's a plant."

A guillotine was wheeled on. The ringmaster cut a watermelon in half, to demonstrate how sharp the blade was. Then he made the man put his hand under the guillotine, and dropped the blade. The gloved hand dropped into the basket, and blood spurted from the open cuff.

Miss Finch squeaked.

Then the man picked his hand out of the basket and chased the Ringmaster around us, while the Benny Hill Show music played.

"Artificial hand," said Jonathan.

"I saw it coming," said Jane.

Miss Finch blew her nose into a tissue. "I think it's all to very questionable taste," she said. Then they led us to