The Prestige

Kate Angier

I was only five at the time, but there's no doubt in my mind that it all really happened. I know that memory can play tricks, especially at night, on a shocked and terrified child, and I know that people patch together memories from what they think happened, or what they wish had happened, or what other people later tell them had happened. All of this went on, and it has taken many years for me to piece together the reality.

It was cruel, violent, unexplained and almost certainly illegal. It wrecked the lives of most of the people involved. It has blighted my own life.

Now I can tell the story as I saw it take place, but tell it as an adult.

#############

My father is Lord Colderdale, the sixteenth of that name. Our family name is Angier, and my father's given names were Victor Edmund; my father is the son of Rupert Angier's only son Edward. Rupert Angier, The Great Danton, was therefore my great-grandfather, and the 14th Earl of Colderdale.

My mother's name was Jennifer, though my father always called her Jenny at home. They met when my father was working for the Foreign Office, where he had been throughout the Second World War. He was not a career diplomat, but for health reasons he had not entered the military but volunteered instead for a civil post. He had read German Literature at university, spent some time in Leipzig during the 1930s, and so was seen as possessing a skill useful to the British Government in wartime. Translation of messages intercepted from the German High Command apparently came into it. He and my mother met in 1946 on a train journey from Berlin to London. She was a nurse who had been working with the Occupying Powers in the German capital, and was returning to England at the end of her tour of duty.

They married in 1947, and around the same time my father was released from his post at the Foreign Office. They came to live here in Caldlow, where my sister and I were eventually born. I don't know much about the years that passed before we came into the world, or why my parents left it so long before having a family. They travelled a great deal, but I believe the driving force behind it was an avoidance of boredom, rather than a positive wish to see different places. Their marriage was never entirely smooth. I know that my mother briefly walked out during the late 1950s, because one day many years later I overheard a conversation between her and her sister, my Auntie Caroline. My sister Rosalie was born in 1962, and I followed in 1965. My father was then nearly fifty, and my mother was in her late thirties.

Like most people, I can't recall much about my first years of life. I remember that the house always seemed cold, and that no matter how many blankets my mother piled on top of my bed, or how hot was my hot-water bottle, I always felt chilled through to the bone. Probably I am remembering just one winter, or one month or one week in one winter, but even now it seems like always. The house is impossible to heat properly in winter; the wind curls through the valley from October to the middle of April. We have snow coverage for about three months of the year. We always burnt a lot of wood from the trees on the estate, and still do, but wood isn't an efficient fuel, like coal or electricity. We lived in the smallest wing of the house, and so as I grew up I really had little idea of the extent of the place.

When I was eight I was sent away to a girls’ boarding school near Congleton, but while I was little I spent most of my life at home with my mother. When I was four she sent me to a nursery school in Caldlow village, and later to the primary school in Baldon, the next village along the road towards Chapel. I was taken to and from the school in my father's black Standard, driven carefully by Mr Stimpson, who with his wife represented our entire domestic staff. Before the Second World War there had been a full household of servants, but all that changed during the war. From 1939 to 1940 the house was used partly to accommodate evacuees from Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds, and partly as a school for the children. It was taken over by the RAF in 1941, and the family has not lived in the main part of the house since. The part of it in which I live is the wing where I grew up.

If there had been any preparations for the visit, Rosalie and I were not told what they were, and the first we knew about it was when a car arrived at the main gate and Stimpson went down to let it in. This was in the days when Derbyshire County Council was using the house, and they always wanted the gates locked at weekends.

The car that drove up to the house was a Mini. The paint had lost its shine, the front bumper was bent from a collision, and there was rust around the windows. It was not at all the sort of car that we were used to seeing call at the house. Most of my parents’ other friends were apparently well-off or important, even during this period when our family had fallen on relatively hard times.

The man who had been driving reached into the back seat of the Mini, and pulled out a little boy, just now waking up. He cradled the boy against his shoulder. Stimpson conducted them politely to the house. Rosalie and I watched as Stimpson returned to the Mini to unload the luggage they had brought with them, but we were told to come down from the nursery and meet the visitors. Everyone was in our main sitting room. Both my parents were dressed up as if it was an important occasion, but the visitors looked more casual.

We were introduced formally, as we were used to; my family took social manners seriously, and Rosalie and I were well versed in them. The man's name was Mr Clive Borden, and the boy, his son, was called Nicholas, or Nicky. Nicky was about two, which was three years younger than me and five years younger than my sister. There did not appear to be a Mrs Borden, but this was not explained to us.

From my own researches I have subsequently found out a little more about this family. I know for instance that Clive Borden's wife had died shortly after the birth of her baby. Her maiden name was Diana Ruth Ellington, and she came from Hatfield in Hertfordshire. Nicholas was her only son. Clive Borden himself was the son of Graham, the son of Alfred Borden, the magician. Clive Borden was therefore the grandson of Rupert Angier's greatest enemy, and Nicky was his great-grandson, my contemporary.

Obviously, Rosalie and I knew nothing of this at the time, and after a few minutes Mama suggested that we might like to take Nicky up to our nursery and show him some of our toys. We meekly obeyed, as we had been brought up to do, with the familiar figure of Mrs Stimpson on hand to look after us all.

What then passed between the three adults I can only guess at, but it lasted all the afternoon. Clive Borden and his boy had arrived soon after lunchtime, and we three children played together, uninterrupted, all afternoon until it was almost dark. Mrs Stimpson kept us occupied, leaving us to play together when we were happy to do so, but reading to us or encouraging us to try new games when we showed signs of flagging. She supervised toilet visits, and brought us snacks and drinks. Rosalie and I grew up surrounded by expensive toys, and to us, even as children, it was clear that Nicky was not used to such excess. With adult hindsight I imagine the toys of two girls were not all that interesting to a two-year-old boy. We got through the long afternoon, however, and I've no memory of squabbles.

What were they talking about downstairs?

I realize that this meeting must have started as one of the occasional attempts our two families have made to patch up the row between our ancestors. Why they, we, could not leave the past to fester and die I do not know, but it seems deep in the psychological make-up of both sides to need to keep fretting over the subject. What could it possibly matter now, or then, that two stage magicians were constantly at each other's throats? Whatever spite, hatred or envy that rankled between those two old men surely could not concern distant descendants who had their own lives and affairs? Well, so it might seem in all common sense, but passions of blood are irrational.

In the case of Clive Borden, irrationality seems part of him, no matter what might have happened to his ancestor. His life has been difficult to research, but I know he was born in west London. He led an average childhood and had a fair talent for sports. He went to Loughborough College after he left school but dropped out after the first year. In the decade afterwards he was frequently homeless, and seems to have stayed in the houses of a number of friends and relatives. He was arrested several times for drunk and disorderly behaviour, but somehow managed to avoid a criminal record. He described himself as an actor and made a precarious living in the film industry, doing extra and stand-in work whenever he could find it, with periods on the dole between. The one short period of emotional and physical stability in his life was when he met and married Diana Ellington. They set up home together in Twickenham, Middlesex, but the marriage turned out to be tragically short-lived. After Diana died Clive Borden stayed on in the flat they had been renting and managed to persuade a married sister, who lived in the same area, to help bring up the baby boy. He kept working in films, and although he was again drifting socially, he appears to have been able to provide for the child. This was his general situation at the time he came to visit my parents.

(After this visit he left the flat in Twickenham, apparently moved back to the centre of London, and in the winter of 1971 went abroad. He went first to the USA, but after that travelled on to either Canada or Australia. According to his sister he changed his name, and deliberately broke all contacts with his past. I have done what investigation I can, but I have been unable to establish even whether he is still alive or not.)

#############

But now I return to that afternoon and evening of Clive Borden's visit to Caldlow House, and try to reconstruct what had taken place while we children played upstairs.

My father would have been making a great show of hospitality, offering drinks and opening a rare wine to celebrate the occasion. The evening meal would be lavish. He would enquire genially about Mr Borden's car journey, or about his views on something that might be in the news, or even about his general wellbeing. This is the way my father invariably behaved when thrust into a social situation whose outcome he could not predict or control. It was the bluff, agreeable faзade put up by a decent English gentleman, lacking in sinister connotation but completely inappropriate for the occasion. I can imagine that it would have made more difficult any reconciliation that they were trying to achieve.

My mother, meanwhile, would be playing a more subtle part. She would be much better attuned to the tensions that existed between the two men, but would feel constrained by being, in this matter, a relative outsider. I believe she would not have said much, at least for the first hour or so, but would be conscious of the need to focus on the one subject that concerned them all. She would have kept trying, subtly and unobtrusively, to steer the conversation in that direction.

I find it harder to talk about Clive Borden, because I hardly knew him, but he had probably suggested the meeting. I feel certain neither of my parents would have done so. There must have been an exchange of letters in the recent past, which led to the invitation. Now I know his financial situation at the time, maybe he was hoping something might come his way as a result of a reconciliation. Or perhaps at last he had traced a family memoir that might explain or excuse Alfred Borden's behaviour. (Borden's book then existed, of course, but few people outside the world of magic knew about it.) On the other hand, he might have found out about the existence of Rupert Angier's personal diary. It's almost certain he kept one, because of his obsession with dates and details, but he either hid or destroyed it before he died.

I'm certain that an attempt to patch up the feud was behind the meeting, no matter who suggested it. What I saw at the time and can remember now was cordial enough, at least at first. It was after all a face-to-face meeting, which was more than their own parents’ generation had ever managed.

The old feud was behind it, no matter what. No other subject joined our families so securely, nor divided them so inevitably. My father's blandness, and Borden's nervousness, would eventually have run out. One of them would have said: well, can you tell us anything new about what happened?

The idiocy of the impasse looms around me as I think back. Any vestige of professional secrecy that once constrained our great-grandfathers would have died with them. No one who came after them in either family was a magician, or showed any interest in magic. If anyone has the remotest interest in the subject it's me, and that's only because of trying to carry out some research into what happened. I've read several books on stage magic, and a few biographies of great magicians. Most of them were modern works, while the oldest one I read was Alfred Borden’s. I know that the art of magic has progressed since the end of the last century, and that what were then popular tricks have long since gone out of fashion, replaced by more modern illusions. In our great-grandfathers’ time, for instance, no one had heard of the trick where someone appears to be sawn in half. That familiar illusion was not invented until the 1920s, long after both Danton and the Professeur were dead. It's in the nature of magic that illusionists have to keep thinking up more baffling ways of working their tricks. The magic of Le Professeur would now seem quaint, unfunny, slow and above all unmysterious. The trick that made him famous and rich would look like a museum piece, and any self-respecting rival illusionist would be able to reproduce it without trouble, and make it seem more baffling.

In spite of this the feud has continued for nearly a century.

On the day of Clive Borden's visit we children were eventually brought down from the nursery, and taken to the dining room to eat with the grown-ups. We liked Nicky, and the three of us were pleased to be seated together along one side of the table. I remember the meal clearly, but only because Nicky was there with us. My sister and I thought he was acting up to amuse us, but I realize now that he could never have sat at a formally laid table before, nor have been served by other people. He simply did not know how to behave. His father sometimes spoke to him harshly, trying to correct him or to calm him down, but Rosalie and I were egging the little boy on. Our parents said nothing to us, because they almost never said anything to us. Parental discipline was not something my kind of parents went in for, and they would never dream of berating us in front of a stranger.

Without our knowing it, our rowdy behaviour undoubtedly contributed to the tension between the adults. Clive Borden's raised voice became a hectoring, grating sound, one I started to dislike. Both my parents were responding badly to him, and any pretence of courtesy was abandoned. They began arguing, and my father addressed him in the voice we usually heard him use in restaurants where the service was slow. By the end of the meal my father was half-drunk, half-enraged; my mother was pale and silent, and Clive Borden (presumably also more than a little drunk) was talking endlessly about his misfortunes. Mrs Stimpson ushered the three of us out into the room next door, our sitting room.

Nicky, for some reason, began to cry. He said he wanted to go home, and when Rosalie and I tried to calm him down he struck out at us, kicking and punching.

We'd seen my father in this sort of mood before.

"I'm frightened," I said to Rosalie.

"I am too," she said.

We listened at the double door connecting the two rooms. We heard raised voices, then long silences. My father was pacing about, clicking his shoes impatiently on the polished parquet floor.

There was one part of the house to which we children were never allowed to go. Access to it was by way of an unprepossessing brown-painted door, set into the triangular section of wall beneath the back staircase. This door was invariably locked, and until the day of Clive Borden's visit I never saw anyone in the household, family or servants, go through it.

Rosalie had told me there was a haunted place behind it. She made up horrifying images, some of them described, some of them left vague for me to visualize for myself. She told me of the mutilated victims imprisoned below, of tragic lost souls in search of peace, of clutching hands and claws that lay in wait for our arms and ankles in the darkness a few inches beyond the door, of shifting and rattling and scratching attempts to escape, of muttered plans for horrid vengeance on those of us who lived in the daylight above. Rosalie had three years’ advantage, and she knew what would scare me.

I was constantly frightened as a child. Our house is no place for the nervous. In winter, on still nights, its isolation sets a silence around the walls. You hear small, unexplained noises; animals, birds, frozen in their hidden places, moving suddenly for warmth; trees and leafless shrubs brushing against each other in the wind; noises on the far side of the valley are amplified and distorted by the funnel shape of the valley floor; people from the village walk along the road that runs by the edge of our grounds. At other times, the wind comes down the valley from the north, blustering after its passage across the moors, howling because of the rocks and broken pastures all over the valley floor, whistling through the ornate woodwork around the eaves and shingles of the house. And the whole place is old, filled with memories of other people's lives, scarred with the remains of their deaths. It is no place for an imaginative child.

Indoors, the gloomy corridors and stairwells, the hidden alcoves and recesses, the dark wall-hangings and sombre ancient portraits, all gave a sense of oppressive threat. The rooms in which we lived were brightly lit and filled with modern furniture, but much of our immediate domestic hinterland was a lowering reminder of dead forefathers, ancient tragedies, silent evenings. I learned to hurry through some parts of the house, fixing my stare dead ahead so as not to be distracted by anything from this macabre past that could harm me. The downstairs corridor beside the rear stairs, where the brown-painted door was found, was one such area of the house. Sometimes I would inadvertently see the door moving slightly to and fro in its frame, as if pressure were being applied from behind. It must have been caused by draughts, but if ever I saw that door in motion I invariably imagined some large and silent being, standing behind it, trying it quietly to see if it could at last be opened.

All through my childhood, both before and after the day that Clive Borden came to visit, I passed the door on the far side of the corridor, never looked at it unless I did so by mistake. I never paused to listen for movement behind it. I always hastened past, trying to ignore it out of my life.

The three of us, Rosalie, myself and the Borden boy Nicky, had been made to wait in the sitting room, next to the dining room where the adults still conducted their incomprehensible conflict. Both of these rooms led out into the corridor where the brown door was situated.

Voices were raised again. Someone passed the connecting door. I heard my mother's voice and she sounded upset.

Then Stimpson walked briskly across the sitting room and slipped through the connecting door into the dining room. He opened and closed it deftly, but we had a glimpse of the three adults beyond; they were still in their positions at the table, but were standing. I briefly saw my mother's face, and it seemed distorted by grief and anger. The door closed quickly before we could follow Stimpson into the room, and he must have taken up position on the other side, to prevent us pushing through.

We heard my father speaking, issuing an order. That tone of voice always meant trouble would follow. Clive Borden said something, and my father replied angrily, in a sufficiently loud voice for us to hear every word.

"You will, Mr Borden!" he said, and in his agitation his voice broke briefly into falsetto. "Now you will! You damned well will!"

We heard the dining-room door to the corridor being opened. Borden said something again, still indistinctly.

Then Rosalie whispered against my ear, "I think Daddy is going to open the brown door !"

We both sucked in our breath, and I clung to Rosalie in panic. Nicky, infected with our fear, let out a wail. I too started making a yowling noise so that I could not hear what the adults were doing.

Rosalie hissed at me, "Hush !"

"I don't want the door opened!" I cried.

Then, tall and sudden, Clive Borden burst into the sitting room from the corridor and found the three of us cowering there. How our little scene must have seemed to him I cannot imagine, but somehow he too had become tainted with the terror that the door symbolized. He stepped forward and down, bracing himself on a bended knee, then scooped Nicky into his arms.

I heard him mutter something to the boy, but it was not a reassuring sound. I was too wrapped up in my own fears to pay attention. It could have been anything. Behind him, across the corridor, beneath the stairs, I saw the open rectangle where the brown door had been. A light was on in the area behind and I could see two steps leading down, then a half-turn with more steps below.

I watched Nicky as he was carried out of the room. His father was holding him high, so that he could wrap his arms around his father's neck, facing back. His father reached up and placed a protective hand on the boy's head as he ducked through the doorway and went down the steps.

#############

Rosalie and I had been left alone, and we were faced with a choice of terrors. One was to remain alone in the familiar surroundings of our living room, the other was to follow the adults down the steps. I was holding on to my older sister, both of my arms wrapped around her leg. There was no sign of Mrs Stimpson.

"Are you going with them?" Rosalie said.

"No! You go! You look and tell me what they're doing!"

"I'm going up to the nursery," she said.

"Don't leave me!" I cried. "I don't want to be here on my own. Don't go!"

"You can come with me."

"No. What are they going to do to Nicky?"

But Rosalie was extricating herself from me, slapping her hand roughly against my shoulder and pushing me away from her. Her face had gone white, and her eyes were half-closed. She was shaking.

"You can do what you like!" she said, and although I tried to grab hold of her again she eluded me and ran out of the room. She went along the dreaded corridor, past the open doorway, then turned on the stone flags at the bottom of the staircase and rushed upstairs. At the time I thought she was being contemptuous of my fear, but from an adult perspective I suspect she had frightened herself more than me.

Whatever the reason I found myself truly alone, but because Rosalie had forced it on me the next decision was easier. A sense of calm swept over me, paralysing my imagination. It was only another form of fear, but it enabled me to move. I knew I could not stay alone where I was, and I knew I did not have the strength to follow Rosalie up those distant stairs. There remained only one place to go. I crossed the short distance to the open brown door and looked down the steps.

There were two lightbulbs in the ceiling illuminating the way down, but at the bottom, where there was another doorway leading to the side, much brighter light was spilling across the steps. The staircase looked bare and ordinary, surprisingly clean, with no hint of any danger, supernatural or otherwise. I could hear voices rising up from below.

I went down the steps quietly, not wishing to be noticed, but when I reached the bottom and looked into the main cellar I realized there was no need to hide myself. The adults were preoccupied with what they were doing.

I was old enough to understand much of what was happening, but not to be able to recall now what the adults were saying. When I first reached the bottom of the steps my father and Clive Borden were arguing again, this time with Borden doing most of the talking. My mother stood to one side, as did the servant, Stimpson. Nicky was still being held to his father's chest.

The cellar was of a size, extent and cleanliness that came as a complete surprise to me. I had no idea that our part of the house had so much space beneath it. From my childish perspective the cellar seemed to have a high ceiling, stretching away on all sides to the white-painted walls, and that these walls were at the limits of my vision. (Although most adults can move around in the cellar without lowering their heads the ceiling is not nearly as high as in the main rooms upstairs, and of course the extent of the cellar is no greater than the area of the house itself.)

Much of the cellar was filled with stuff brought down from the main house for storage: a lot of the furniture moved out during the war was still there, draped with white dust-sheets. Along the length of one wall was a stack of framed canvases, their painted sides facing in so that they could not be seen. An area close to the steps, partitioned off by a brick wall, was made over as a wine cellar. On the far side of the main cellar, difficult to see from where I was standing, was another large stack of crates and chests, tidily arranged.

The overall impression of the cellar was spacious, cool, clean. It was a place that was in use but it was also kept tidy. However, none of this really impressed itself on me at the time. Everything that I've described so far is modified memory, based on what I know.

On the day, what grabbed my attention from the moment I reached the bottom of the steps was the apparatus built in the centre of the cellar.

My first thought was that it was a kind of shallow cage, because it was a circle of eight sturdy wooden slats. Next I realized that it had been built in a pit in the floor. To enter it one had to step down, so that it was in fact larger than it looked at first. My father, who had stepped into the centre of the circle, was only visible from about his waist up. There was also an arrangement of wiring overhead, and something whose shape I could not clearly make out rotating on a central axis, glittering and flashing in the cellar lights. My father was working hard, there was obviously some kind control arrangement below my line of sight, and he was bending over, pumping his arm at something.

My mother stood back, watching intently with Stimpson at her side. These two were silent.

Clive Borden stood close to one of the wooden bars, watching my father as he worked. His son Nicky was upright in his arms, and had turned around to look down too. Borden was saying something, and my father, while continuing to pump, answered loudly, and with a gesticulating arm. I knew my father was in a dangerous mood, the sort Rosalie and I suffered when we had enraged him to the point where he felt he had to prove something to us, no matter how ridiculous.

I realized Borden was provoking him into this kind of rage, perhaps deliberately. I stepped forward, not to any of the adults, but towards Nicky. This small boy was caught up in something he could not possibly understand, and my instinct was to rush across to him, take hold of his hand and perhaps lead him away from the dangerous adult game.

I had walked half the distance to the group, entirely unnoticed by any of them, when my father shouted, "Stand back, everyone!"

My mother and Stimpson, who presumably knew what was going to happen, immediately moved back a few paces. My mother said something in what was for her a loud voice, but her words were drowned by a rising din from the device. It hummed and fizzed, restlessly, dangerously. Clive Borden had not moved, and stood only a foot or two away from the edge of the pit. Still no one looked at me.

A series of loud bangs suddenly burst forth from the top of the device, and with each one appeared a long, snaking tendril of white electrical discharge. As each shot out it prowled like the reaching tentacle of some terrible deep-sea creature, groping for its prey. The noise was tremendous; every flash, every waving feeler of naked energy, was accompanied by a screeching, hissing sound, loud enough to hurt my ears. My father looked up towards Borden, and I could see a familiar expression of triumph on his face.

"Now you know!" he yelled at him.

"Turn it off, Victor!" my mother cried.

"But Mr Borden has insisted! Well, here it is, Mr Borden! Does this satisfy your insistence?"

Borden was still standing as if transfixed, just a short distance from the snaking electrical discharge. He was holding his little boy in his arms. I could see the expression on Nicky's face, and I knew he was as scared as I was.

"This proves nothing!" Borden shouted.

My father's response was to close a large metal handle attached to one of the pillars inside the contraption. The zigzagging beams of energy immediately doubled in size, and snaked with more agility than ever around the wooden bars of the cage. The noise was deafening.

"Get in, Borden," my father shouted. "Get in and see for yourself!"

To my amazement my father then climbed out of the pit, stepping up to the main floor of the cellar between two of the wooden bars. Instantly, a number of the electrical rays flashed across to him, hissing horribly about his body. For a moment he was surrounded by them, consumed by fire. He seemed to fuse with the electricity, illuminated from within, a figure of gruesome menace. Then he took another step, and he was out of it.

"Not scared , are you, Borden?" he shouted harshly.

I was close enough to see that the hair on my father's head was standing up from his scalp, and the hairs that stuck out from his sleeves were on end. His clothes hung oddly on his body, as if ballooning away from him, and his skin seemed to my mortified eyes to be glowing permanently blue as a result of his few seconds bathed in the electricity.

"Damn you, damn you!" cried Borden.

He turned on my father, and thrust the horror-struck child at him. Nicky tried to hang on to his father, but, Borden forced him away. My father accepted the boy reluctantly, taking him in an awkward hold. Nicky was yelling with terror, and struggling to be released.

"Jump in now!" my father yelled at Borden. "It will go in the next few seconds!"

Borden took a step forward until he was at the edge of the zone of electricity. My father was beside him, while Nicky was reaching out with his arms, screaming and screaming for his daddy. Waving blue snakes of discharge moved crazily a fraction of an inch in front of Borden. His hair rose from his scalp, and I could see him clenching and unclenching his fists. His head drooped briefly forward, and as it did so one of the tendrils instantly found him, snaking down his neck, around his shoulders and back, splattering noisily on the floor between his shoes.

He leapt back in terror, and I felt sorry for him.

"I can't do it!" he gasped. "Turn the bloody thing off”

"This is what you wanted, isn't it?"

My father was filled with madness. He stepped forward, away from Clive Borden, and into the deadly barrage of electricity. Half a dozen tentacles instantly wound themselves around him and the boy, imbuing them both with the lethal cyanic glow. All the hairs on his head were standing on end, making him more terrible than ever I had seen him.

He threw Nicky into the pit.

My father stepped back, away from the deadly barrage.

As Nicky fell, his arms and legs scrabbling wildly at the air, he screamed again, one despairing yell. It was a single sustained outbursting of sheer terror, loneliness and fear of abandonment.

Before he hit the ground the device exploded with light. Flames leapt from the overhead wires, and a crash rang out violently. The wooden struts seemed to swell outwards with the pressure from within, and as the tentacles of light withdrew into themselves they did so with a screech as of sharp steel sliding against steel.

Horribly, it had ended. Thick blue smoke hung heavily in the air, spreading torpidly outwards across the ceiling of the cellar. The device was at last silent, and doing nothing. Nicky lay motionless on the hard floor beneath the structure.

Somewhere in the distance, it seemed, I could hear his terrible scream echoing still.

My eyes were half blind from the brilliant dazzle of the electric flares; my ears were singing from the assault of the noise; my mind ran deliriously with the shock of what I had witnessed.

I walked forward, drawn by the sight of that smoking pit. Now still and apparently in repose it was full of threat, yet even so I felt myself drawn inexorably to it. Soon I was standing at the edge, beside my mother. .My hand went up, as so often before, and folded itself into her fingers. She too was staring down in revulsion and disbelief.

Nicky was dead. His face had frozen in death as he screamed, and his arms and legs were twisted, a snapshot of his flailing as he was thrown into the pit by my father. He lay on his back. His hair had horripilated as he went through the electric field, and it stood up around his petrified face.

Clive Borden emitted a dreadful howl of misery, anger and despair, and leapt down into the pit. He threw himself on the ground, wrapped his arms around the body of his son, tried tenderly to pull the boy's limbs back to their normal position, cradled the boy's head with a hand, pressed his face against the boy's cheek, all the while shaking with terrible sobs coming from deep within him.

And my mother, as if realizing for the first time that I was there beside her, suddenly swept her arms around me, pressed my face into her skirt, then lifted me up. She walked quickly across the cellar, bearing me away from the scene of the disaster.

I was facing back over her shoulder, and as we went quickly out to the staircase my last sight was of my father. He was staring down into the pit, and his face bore such an expression of harsh satisfaction that more than two decades later I can still remember it only with a shudder of repulsion.

My father had known what would happen, he had allowed it to happen, he had made it happen. Everything about his stance and his expression said: I've proved my point .

I noticed also that Stimpson, the servant, was crouching on the floor, balancing himself with his hands. His head was bowed.

I've lost, or suppressed, all memories of what happened in the immediate aftermath. I only recall being at school during the following year, and then changing schools, making new friends, gradually growing up through childhood. There was a rush of normality around me, almost like a flood of embarrassed compensation for the appalling scene I had witnessed.

Nor can I remember when my father walked out on us. I know the date it happened, because I found it in the diary my mother kept in the last years of her life, but my own memory of that time is lost. Because of her diary I also know most of her feelings about the split-up, and a few of the circumstances. For my part I remember a general sense of his being there when I was small, an unnerving and unpredictable figure, thankfully at a remove from the lives of his two young daughters. I also remember life afterwards without him, a strong sense of his absence, a peace that Rosalie and I made the most of and which has continued ever since.

I was glad at first that he went. It was only when I was older that I began to miss him, as I do now. I believe he must be alive still, because otherwise we would have heard. Our estate is complicated to run, and my father is still responsible for that. There is a family trust, administered by solicitors in Derby, and they are apparently in touch with him. The house and land and title are still in his name. Many of the direct charges, such as taxation, are dealt with and paid by the trust, and money is still made available to Rosalie and me.

Our last direct contact with him was about five years ago, when he wrote a letter from South Africa. Passing through, he said, although he didn't say where from or where to. He is in his seventies now, probably hanging out somewhere with other British exiles, not letting on about his background. Harmless, a bit dotty, vague on details, an old Foreign Office hand. I can't forget him. No matter how much time passes, I always remember him as the cruel-faced man who threw a small boy into a machine he must have known would certainly kill him.

Clive Borden left the house the same night. I've no idea what happened to Nicky's body, although I have always assumed that Borden took it with him.

Because I was so young I accepted my parents’ authority as final and when they told me the police would not be interested in the boy's death, I believed them. In the event, they seemed to be right.

Years later, when I was old enough to realize how wrong it was, I tried to ask my mother what had happened. This was after my father had left home, and about two years before she died.

It felt to me as if the time had come to clear up the mysteries of the past, to put some of the darkness behind us. I also saw it as a sign of my own growing up. I wanted her to be frank with me and treat me like an adult. I knew she had received a letter from my father earlier that week, and it gave me an excuse to bring up the subject.

"Why did the police never come round to ask questions?" I said, when I had made it plain that I wanted to talk about that night.

She said, "We do never talk about that, Katherine."

"You mean that you never do," I said. "But why did Daddy leave home?"

"You would have to ask him that."

"You know I can't," I said. "You're the only one who knows. He did something wrong that night, but I'm not sure why, and I'm not even sure how. Are the police looking for him?"

"The police aren't involved in our lives."

"Why not?" I said. "Didn't Daddy kill that boy? Wasn't that murder?"

"It was all dealt with at the time. There is nothing to hide, nothing to feel guilty about. We paid the price for what happened that night. Mr Borden suffered most, of course, but look what it has done to all our lives. I can tell you nothing you want to know. You saw for yourself what happened."

"I can't believe that's the end of it," I said.

"Katherine, you should know better than to ask these questions. You were there too. You're as guilty as the rest of us."

"I was only five years old!" I said. "How could that possibly make me guilty of something?"

"If you're in any doubt you could establish that by going to the police yourself."

My courage failed me in the face of her cold and unyielding demeanour. Mr and Mrs Stimpson still worked for us then, and later I asked Stimpson the same questions. Politely, stiffly, tersely, he denied all knowledge of anything that might have taken place.

My mother died when I was eighteen. Rosalie and I half-expected news of it to make our father return eventually from exile, but it did not. We stayed on in the house, and slowly it dawned on us that the place was ours. We reacted differently. Rosalie gradually freed herself of the place, and in the end she moved away. I began to be trapped by it, and I'm still here. A large part of what held me was the feeling of guilt I could not throw off, about what had happened down there in the cellar. Everything centred on those events, and in the end I realized I would have to do something about purging myself of what happened.

I finally plucked up my courage and went down to the cellar to discover if anything of what I had seen was still there.

I chose to do it on a day in summer, when friends were visiting from Sheffield and the house was full of the sounds of rock music and the talk and laughter of young people. I told no one what I was planning, and simply slipped away from a conversation in the garden and walked into the house. I was braced with three glasses of wine.

The lock on the door had been changed soon after the Borden visit, and when my mother died I had it changed again, although I had never actually ventured inside. Mr Stimpson and his wife were long gone, but they and the housekeepers who came after them used the cellar for storage. I had always been too nervous even to go to the top of the steps.

On that day, though, I wasn't going to let anything stop me. I had been preparing mentally for some time. Once through the door I locked it from the inside (one of the changes I had brought about), switched on the electric lights, and walked down to the cellar.

I looked immediately for the apparatus that had killed Nicky Borden, but, unsurprisingly, it was no longer there. However, the circular pit was still in the centre of the cellar floor, and I went over and inspected that. It appeared to have been constructed more recently than the rest of the screed floor; it had clearly been excavated with a plan in mind, because several steel ties were drilled into the concrete sides at regular intervals, presumably to act as stays for the wooden bars of the apparatus. In the ceiling overhead, directly above the centre of the pit, there was a large electrical junction box. A thick cable led away to a voltage converter at the side of the cellar, but the box itself had become dirty and rusty.

I noticed that there were numerous scorch marks on the ceiling radiating out from the box, and although someone had put a coat of white emulsion paint over these they still showed through clearly.

Apart from all this there was no sign that the apparatus had ever been in place.

I found the thing itself a few moments later, when I went to investigate the collection of crates, cases and large mysterious objects stored neatly along most of the length of one wall. I soon realized that this was where my great-grandfather's magic paraphernalia had been stored, presumably after his death. Near the front, but otherwise stacked unobtrusively, were two stoutly made wooden crates, each of them so heavy I was unable to budge them, let alone get them out of the cellar on my own. Stencilled in black on one of them, but greatly faded with age were routing names: "Denver, Chicago, Boston, Liverpool (England)". A Customs manifest was still stapled to the side, although it was so frayed that it came off in my hand when I touched it. Holding it under the nearest light I saw that someone had written in copperplate, "Contents — Scientific Instruments’. Metal hoops had been attached on all four sides of both crates, to facilitate hoisting, and there were obvious handholds all over the crates.

I tried to open the nearer of the two, fumbling along the edge of the lid to find some way to force it open, when to my surprise the top swivelled upwards lightly, balanced within in some way. I knew at once I had found the workings of the electrical apparatus I had seen that night, but because it had been disassembled all menace was gone.

Attached to the inside of the lid were several large sheets of cartridge paper, still uncurled and unyellowed, even in great age, and instructions had been written in a clear but tiny and fastidious hand. I glanced over the first few:

1. Locate, check, and test local ground connection. If insufficient, do not proceed. See (27) below for details of how to install, check, and test a ground connection. Always check wiring colors; see chart attached.

2. [If not used in USA or Great Britain.] Locate, check, and test local electricity supply. Use instrument located in Wallet 4.5.1 to determine nature, voltage, and cycle of current. Refer to (15) below for settings to main transforming unit.

3. Test reliability of local electricity supply while assembling the apparatus. If there is divergence of ±25V do not attempt to operate the apparatus.

4. When handling components, always wear the protective gloves located in Wallet 3.19.1 (spares in 3.19.2).

And so on, an exhaustive checklist of assembly instructions, many of them using technical or scientific words and phrases. (I have since arranged for a copy to be made, which I keep in the house.) The whole list was signed with the initials "F.K.A.".

Inside the lid of the second crate was a similar list of instructions, these dealing with safely disconnecting the apparatus, dismantling it and stowing the components inside the crates in their correct places.

It was at this moment that it began to dawn on me who my great-grandfather had actually been. What I mean by this is the sense of what he had done, what he had been capable of, what he had achieved in his life. Until then he was just an ancestor, Grandpa who had his stuff about the house. It was my first glimpse of the person he might have been. These crates, with their meticulous instructions, had been his and the instructions had been written by or more likely for him. I stood there for a long time, imagining him unpacking the apparatus with his assistants, racing against the clock to get the thing set up in time for the first performance. I still knew almost nothing about him, but at last I had an insight into what he did, and a little of how he did it.

(Later in the year, I sorted through the rest of his stuff and this too helped me sense what he was like. The room that had been his study was full of neatly filed papers: correspondence, bills, magazines, booking forms, travel documents, playbills, theatre programmes. A large part of his life was filed away there, and there was more in the cellar, costumes and paraphernalia from his shows. Most of the costumes had fallen to bits with old age, and I threw them out, but the cabinet illusions were in working or repairable condition, and because I needed the money I sold the best examples to magic collectors. I also disposed of Rupert Angier's collection of magic books. From the people who came to buy, I learnt that much of his material was valuable, but only in cash terms. Little of it had more than curiosity value to modern magicians. Most of the illusions The Great Danton performed were of an everyday variety, and to the expert or collector they contained no surprises. I did not sell the electrical apparatus, and it is still down in the cellar in its crates.)

By some means I had not planned, going down into the cellar put my childish fears of it behind me. Perhaps it was as simple as the fact that in the intervening years I had grown into an adult, or in the absence of the rest of the family had become the effective head of the household. Whatever the reason, when I emerged from the old brown door, locking it behind me, I believed I had thrown off something unwelcome that had dogged my life until then.

It was not enough, though. Nothing could excuse the fact that I had seen a small boy cruelly murdered that night, and by my own father.

This secret has wormed itself into my life, indirectly influencing everything I do, inhibiting me emotionally and immobilizing me socially. I am isolated here. I rarely make friends, I want no lovers, a career does not interest me. Since Rosalie moved out to get married I have lived here alone, as much a victim as my parents were.

I want to distance myself from the madness that the feud has brought to my family in the past, but as I grow older I believe more strongly the only way out is to face up to it. I cannot get on with my life until I understand how and why Nicky Borden died.

His death nags at me. The obsession would end if I knew more about the boy, and what really happened to him that night. As I have learned about my family's past, I have learned inevitably about the Bordens. I traced you, Andrew, because I think you and I are the key to the whole thing — you are the sole surviving Borden, while I am to all intents the last living Angier.

Against all logic, I know Nicky Borden was you , Andrew, and that somehow you survived that ordeal.

The rain had turned to snow during the evening, and it was still falling as Andrew Westley and Kate Angier sat together over the remains of dinner. Her story appeared at first to produce no response from him, because he merely looked quietly at his empty coffee cup, fingering the spoon in the saucer. Then he said he needed to stretch. He crossed the room to the window to stare out at the garden, and cradled his hands behind his neck, waggling his head from side to side. It was pitch black out there in the grounds, and she knew there was nothing for him to see. The main road was behind the house and at a lower level; on this side of the house there was just the lawn, the wood, the rising hill, and beyond all that the rocky crag of Curbar Edge. He did not change position for some time, and without being able to see his face Kate felt that either his eyes must be closed or he was staring blankly into the dark.

In the end he said, "I'll tell you all I know. I lost contact with my twin brother when I was about the same age as you're describing. Maybe what you've told me would explain that. But his birth wasn't registered, so I can't prove he exists. But I know he's real. You've heard how twins have a kind of rapport? That's how I'm sure. The other thing I know is that he is connected in some way with this house. Ever since I arrived today I've been sensing him here. I don't know how, and I can't explain."

"I've looked at the records too," she said. "You don't have a twin."

"Could someone have tampered with official records? Is that possible?"

"That's what I wonder. If the boy was killed, wouldn't that give someone enough motive to find a way of falsifying the records?"

"Maybe so. All I can say for sure is that I don't remember anything about it. It's all blank. I don't even remember my father, Clive Borden. That child obviously couldn't have been me, and it's absurd even to think it was. It must have been someone else."

"But it was your father… and Nicky was his only child."

He turned from the window, and went back to his chair. It was across the wide table from hers.

"Look, there are only two or three possibilities," he said. "The boy was me, and I was killed and now I'm alive again. That doesn't make any sense, whichever way you look at it. Or the boy who died was my twin brother, and the person who killed him, presumably that's your father, later managed to get official records changed. I don't believe that either, frankly. Or you were mistaken, the child survived, and it might or might not have been me. Or… I suppose you could have imagined the whole thing."

"No. I didn't imagine it. I know what I saw. Anyway my mother as good as admitted it." She picked up her copy of the Borden book, and opened it at a page she had previously marked with a slip of paper. "There's another explanation, but it's as illogical as the others. If you weren't actually killed that night, then it might have been some kind of trick. The thing I saw being used that night was apparatus built for a stage illusion."

She turned the book around, and held it out to him, but he waved it away.

"The whole thing is ridiculous," he said.

"I saw it happen."

"I think you were either mistaken in what you saw, or it happened to someone else." He glanced again towards the windows with their undrawn curtains, then looked at his watch in a distracted way. "Do you mind if I use my mobile? I must tell my parents I'm going to be late. And I'd like to ring my flat in London."

"I think you should stay the night." He grinned briefly then, and Kate knew she had said it the wrong way. She found him fairly attractive, in a harmlessly coarse sort of way, but he was apparently the kind of man who never gave up about sex. "I meant that Mrs Makin will prepare the spare room for you."

"If she has to."

There had been that moment before they came in here for dinner. She must have given him too much rye whiskey, or had said too often that there were irreconcilable differences between her family and his. Or perhaps it was a combination of the two. Until then she had been rather liking the way he had leered in an open and unembarrassed way at her, off and on all afternoon, but an hour and a half ago, just before they came in here for dinner, he'd made it plain that he would like to try some reconciliation between the families. Just the two of them, the last generation. A part of her remained flattered, but what he had in mind was not what she had had in mind. She'd brushed him off, as gently as she knew how.

"Are you fit to drive in snow, with drink inside you?" she said now.

"Yes."

But he did not move from the chair. She laid the Borden book on the table between them, face-down at the open pages.

"What do you want from me, Kate?" he said.

"I don't know any more. Perhaps I never did. I think this is what happened when Clive Borden came to see my father. They both felt they should try to sort something out, went through the motions of trying, but the ancient differences still mattered."

"There's only one thing that interests me. My twin brother is somewhere here. In this house. Ever since you showed me your grandfather's stuff this afternoon I've been aware of him. He tells me not to leave, to come, to find him. I've never known his presence as strong in me. Whatever you say, whatever the birth register shows, I think it was my brother who came here to the house in 1970, and I think he's somehow still here."

"In spite of the fact he doesn't exist."

"Yes, in spite of that. At the same time, we both know there's something strange about what happened that night. Or you do, at least."

She had no answer to that, because she felt herself at an impasse. It was the same one she had always known; the certain death of a little boy, whom she later discovered had somehow survived. Meeting the man who had been the boy had changed nothing. It was him, it had not been him.

She poured herself another drop of brandy, and Andrew said, "Is there somewhere I can make those calls?"

"Stay in here. This is the warmest place in the house in winter. I've got something I want to check."

As she left the room she heard him jabbing at the buttons of his mobile phone. She went down to the main hall and looked through the front door. There was a solid covering of snow, two or three inches. It always settled smoothly here, on the sheltered pathway, but she knew that further down the valley, where the main road was, the snow would already be drifting against the hedges and roadside banks. There were no sounds of traffic, which could usually be heard from here. She went around to the back of the house, and saw that a drift was building up against the woodshed. Mrs Makin was in the kitchen, so she spoke to her and asked her to get the spare room ready.

She and Andrew remained in the dining room after Mrs Makin had cleared away the meal, sitting on opposite sides of the open fireplace, talking about various everyday things; his trouble with the girl he lived with, hers with the local council who wanted some of her land for building purposes. But she was tired, and had no real appetite for this. At eleven she suggested they should continue in the morning.

She showed him where the spare room was, and which bathroom he could use. Rather to her surprise, a second proposition was not offered. He thanked her politely for her hospitality, said goodnight, and that was that.

Kate returned to the dining room, where she had left some of her great-grandfather's papers. They were already stacked neatly; some hereditary trait, perhaps, that prevented her from scattering paper everywhere. There had always been a part of her that wanted to be untidy, casual, free, but it was in her nature not to be.

She sat down in the chair closest to the fire, and felt the glow against her legs. She threw on another log. Now Andrew had gone to bed she felt less sleepy. It hadn't been him that had worn her out, but talking to him, dredging up all those memories from childhood. To talk them out was a kind of purging, a release of pent-up poisons, and she felt better.

She sat by the fire, thinking about that old incident, trying as she had done for a quarter of a century to confront what it meant. It still struck fright to the core of her. And the boy Andrew called his brother was at the heart of it all, a hostage to the past.

Mrs Makin came in just then, and Kate asked if she would make her some decaffeinated coffee before she went to bed. She listened to the midnight news on Radio 4 as she sipped the coffee, and later the BBC World Service came on. She continued to be wide awake. The spare room Andrew was in was immediately overhead, and she could hear him turning frequently in the ancient bed. She knew how cold that room could be. It had been her bedroom as a child.