The Devil You Know

“Now,” I said, with a smile as wide as a Halloween pumpkin, “for my last and most ambitious trick before you all go off and feed your faces, I need another volunteer from the audience.” I pointed at Sebastian. “You, sir, in the second row. Would you be so good?” Sebastian looked hangdog, intensely reluctant. Stepping into the spotlight meant certain humiliation and possibly much worse. But the older boys were whistling and catcalling, and Peter was telling him to get the hell up there and do it. So he stood up and worked his way along the row, tripping a couple of times over the outstretched feet that were planted in his path.

This was going to be cruel, but not to stepbrother Sebastian. No, my un-birthday gift to him was a loaded gun that he could use in any way he wanted to. And for Peter . . . well, sometimes cruelty is kindness in disguise. Sometimes pain is the best teacher. Sometimes it does you no harm to realize that there’s a limit to what you can get away with.

Sebastian had made his way around to my side of the trestle table now, and he was standing awkwardly next to me. I picked up the Autographic and slipped the hooks on either side, wheeling the bellows out fully into its working position. With its red leather and dark wood, it looked like a pretty impressive piece of kit; when I gave it to Sebastian to hold, he took it gingerly.

“Please examine the camera,” I told him. “Make sure it’s okay. Fully functional, fully intact.” He glanced at it cursorily, without enthusiasm, nodded, and tried to hand it back to me.

I didn’t take it. “Sorry,” I said, “you’re my cameraman now. You have to do the job properly, because I’m relying on you.”

He looked again, and this time he noticed what was staring him in the face.

“Well—there’s black tape,” he said. “Over the lens.”

I affected to be surprised and took a look for myself. “Gentlemen,” I said to the room at large. “Ladies.” A five-second pause for howls of mocking laughter, nudges, and pointing fingers. “My assistant has just brought something very alarming to my attention. This camera has black masking tape over the lens, and it can’t therefore take photographs”—I let the pause lengthen—“in the normal way. We’re going to have to try to take a spirit photo.”

Peter and Peter’s friends looked pained and scornful at this suggestion; it sounded to them like a pretty lame finale.

“Spirit photographs are among the most difficult feats for the magician to encompass,” I told them gravely, paying no attention to the sounds of derision. “Think of an escapologist freeing himself from a mailbag suspended upside down from a hook in a cage that has been dumped out of a jet plane flying about two miles up. Well, this trick is a little like that. Less visually spectacular, but just as flamboyantly pointless.”

I gestured to the birthday boy. “We’re going to take your picture, Peter,” I told him. “So why don’t you go and stand over there, by the wall. A plain background works best for this.”

Peter obeyed with a great show of heavy resignation.

“You have another brother?” I asked Sebastian, quietly.

He glanced up at me, startled. “No,” he said.

“Or a cousin or something—someone your own age who used to live here with you?”

He shook his head.

“You know how to use a camera?”

Sebastian was on firmer ground here, and he looked relieved. “Yeah. I’ve got one upstairs. But it’s just point and shoot, it doesn’t have any . . . focus thing, or . . .”

I dismissed these objections with a shake of the head, giving him a reassuring half smile. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “This one focuses manually, but we’re not going to bother with that anyway. Because we’re not using either the lens or ordinary light to form the image. But the thing you’re going to be clicking is this.” I gave him the air bulb—sitting at the end of a coil of rubber tubing, it was the only part of the camera that I’d had to replace. “You squeeze it hard, and it opens the shutter. When I say, okay?”

I hadn’t loaded the Autographic for more than a decade, but all the stuff I needed was right there in the box, and my hands knew what to do. I lined up a new plate, peeled away one corner of the waxed cover sheet, then slammed it into place and tore the cover free in one smooth movement. It wasn’t what a professional would have done, partly because there was bound to be some seepage of light if you loaded the camera like that in an ordinarily lit room—but mostly because I was loading print paper rather than negative film. We were cutting out one stage of the normal photographic process. Again, it didn’t matter, but I noticed as I was tightening the screws up again that James and Barbara Dodson had wandered in and were standing at the back of the room. That was going to mean a louder eruption, but by this stage I didn’t really give a monkey’s chuff; Peter had gotten quite seriously under my skin.