19

3 A.M.

Some places look romantic by moonlight – a place where star-crossed lovers might secretly meet on the first day of the rest of their lives.

Some look magical, like they have sprouted from the ground fully formed, for one night only, full of mystery and promise. And at considerable expense!

Some look scary, like ancient Eastern European aristocracy with big teeth and a taste for blood should be flying round the turrets, their cloaks flapping like bat wings.

It would take more than one moon to have any kind of effect like that on Tudor Towers. Two or three moons, a ringed gas giant and maybe a nearby supernova in the sky might just do something, but there was none of that on this particular night. To the Young Magicians, as the hotel front loomed before them, Tudor Towers was just the place they were coming back to after failing in their task. For all their efforts they hadn’t learned anything new.

‘I was so sure Alf would be able to help,’ Jonny moaned. The surprise of hearing that his grandfather was out of jail had been a knock. He wasn’t sure if he felt hurt, or relieved, that Ernest hadn’t let him (or, he presumed, his parents) know of his release. Still, he forced it to the back of his mind, for he had better things to lament … Their plan – his plan – had, to all intents and purposes, failed. They knew nothing more about Ron and Nancy Spencer’s act, and – crucially – no clue as to how President Pickle had managed to appear and vanish seemingly at will.

Alex yawned and looked forward to drying off his soggy, wet feet and resting them in bed. Sophie just stared at the ground, wrapped up in her own thoughts.

‘We’re close,’ Zack said, rubbing his temples. ‘It’s … there. Somewhere inside my head. I feel like we’ve got all the facts, it just needs to – I don’t know – sort itself out.’

They pushed through the doors and into the gloom of the lobby.

‘Did you manage anything evil?’ a dolorous voice asked out of the dark.

‘’Fraid not,’ Jonny said glumly. The night porter tutted.

‘Ah well. There’s always tomorrow.’

The hotel was deathly quiet now. As far as the friends knew, they were the only ones still up. They mooched sleepily and silently down the corridor to the lift.

‘Do you think –?’ Zack began. The others looked at him. ‘Do you honestly think this is a deliberate set-up by President Pickle? I know he’s got it in for us, and I know what we all heard him say – but do you think he’d really deliberately set this up, along with the fake death threats and going without food and all that, just to make us look even more stupid? It seems unnecessarily elaborate. Surely he’s got better things to do?’

‘Even if that’s true, it doesn’t explain how he appeared and vanished in plain sight,’ stated Alex, rubbing his eyes under his glasses. ‘Nor why he would make something up like that to Eric and Belinda either.’

‘Right,’ the others agreed, all after a slight delay.

The lift took them up to their floor. Even Steve and Jane had turned in for the night, obviously under the impression they had successfully warded off any illegal extraneous expeditions.

They got to their doors and paused, looking at each other. Then, with a silent four-way shrug, they pushed their way into their rooms.

‘Sophie! I simply HAVE to tell you this!’ sounded a familiar voice.

Sophie rolled her eyes in the dark, and turned the light on. Deanna was sitting up in bed and staring at her, seemingly wide awake.

‘Deanna.’ Sophie looked down at herself. Outdoor clothes spattered with rain, legs dotted with mud splashes. ‘I didn’t know you were still up.’

‘Buffalo wings!’ Deanna exclaimed.

Sophie stared back at her, confused.

‘Buffaloes don’t have wings! It should be buffalo tentacles!’

‘Because … buffaloes totally have tentacles?’ Sophie ventured.

Deanna continued to stare at her, a bit wild-eyed.

‘And no one ever carries a dog on the escalator even though it says dogs must be carried!’

Sophie frowned. ‘Not really seeing the connection, but –’

‘Do you think it’s illegal to make fun of seagulls? It totally should be because roundabouts are so cool.’

Sophie leaned in closer, peering into Deanna’s eyes. They weren’t quite focused. She waved a hand: Deanna didn’t blink. Sophie smiled and breathed out in relief.

Deanna was asleep. This was just sleep talk.

Still, Sophie thought as she got ready for bed and Deanna talked about her plans for building a mosquito trap on the clifftops, she hoped Deanna would shut up eventually. Even better, very soon.

Then Sophie realized that, if Deanna were asleep, what was coming out of her now was her subconscious. Deanna was just dreaming out loud. The top levels of her mind weren’t even switched on.

Which meant that the route into the back of her brain lay wide open.

‘Deanna,’ Sophie said in her most assured mentalist voice, ‘go back to sleep.’

Deanna’s voice dried up like someone had turned off a tap inside her. She keeled over and lay on her side with her eyes closed. A few moments later, she started to snore.

Sophie tugged Deanna’s duvet over her, then got into her own bed and turned the light off.

But sleep was a long time coming, as she lay awake in the dark, staring up at the ceiling and running President Pickle’s astonishing disappearance through her head, over and over on a continuous loop, not to mention Belinda Vine’s earlier performance of Ron and Nancy Spencer’s mind-boggling act.

Could it have been some kind of hypnosis? Making the Young Magicians think President Pickle had disappeared when in fact he had been there all the time?

Sophie was very good at short-circuiting other people’s minds. With a bit of distraction and confidence, and the right tone of voice, she could make them think things were different to how they were.

But it was only ever for a second or two. With her kind of magic, you had to do the trick and then move on, quick, before the mark realized. It wasn’t like you could hypnotize someone and keep them under your spell as they let you into the loose change vaults of the Bank of England.

Plus, you can’t hypnotize someone who doesn’t even know you’re there. The Young Magicians hadn’t known President Pickle was there – and Sophie was certain he hadn’t known they were either. Otherwise he would have said something when they came in. Conclusion: it wasn’t hypnosis. But what was it then …?

It was a very stared-at ceiling that night, or it would have been if the lights had been on for anyone to see it. In the dark of the room next door, in their own beds, the three boys were doing exactly the same thing.

How would I do it? Jonny was thinking. And the immediate answer that came to him was: Well, with a gadget, of course. That was what he was good at after all. Making things.

OK, so how had President Pickle vanished with a gadget?

There was no trapdoor. They’d checked.

Jonny’s eyes narrowed as sleep hovered round the edges of his mind and his thoughts began to run into each other with less discrimination than they usually showed when he was fully awake. Hmm, a backdrop! A backdrop, hanging from floor to ceiling, painted to look exactly like the back of the room – with some really high-quality airbrushing by someone with a good grasp of perspective. President Pickle just stands behind it. At the right moment, he presses a button and the backdrop whips up to the ceiling. To anyone not looking directly at it, he just seems to appear. Then he reverses the process to disappear.

Except …

One, no backdrop could be that good when you were up close to it. If it existed, it would have been within a couple of metres of the four friends. They would have noticed.

And even if you ignored that – they had explored every inch of that room. They would still have noticed. They would have bumped into it.

(Sorry, Jonny, not even close, though it would make a neat trick at another time, if you can work on it.)

Networking, Alex thought. His mind was on Belinda and Eric Diva’s act. Eric Diva loved to chat and be friendly. It was what he’d been doing all convention. But then what if … every time he chats to someone, he notices something about them and commits it to memory?

Hmm. Alex frowned a little as it started to come together in his head. This guy has a blue Nokia phone, that guy has a Casio watch … Ooh, and maybe he uses a nail-writer to secretly make a list as he goes. Which he passes to Belinda. Which she memorizes. And then …

Alex’s heart began to beat a little faster. He was so close! He could feel it!

Then Eric Diva goes round the audience, from person to person, in exactly the same order as before, and gets them to hold up the items he’s already made a note of, and Belinda just goes through the list off by heart …

Alex’s face fell.

Except that everyone had got changed for the Gala Show. They had put on suits and ties and posh frocks and glad rags. How could Eric Diva know that they would all have the same items on them later that day? Or how could he have stopped them from producing something else from their handbag or pocket or whatnot when asked?

And how did any of it relate to or explain President Pickle’s vanishing act? No, I’m way off.

But … Sleep was closing in. What if …

(A rather good trick in the making there, Alex – you could probably set up your own telepathy act along those lines if you work on it and get over your dislike of schmoozing with strangers. But, like Jonny, you’re barking down the wrong plughole, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor and to steal a saying from Deanna’s dreamy diatribe. Let’s see how Zack is doing …)

Over in his bed across the room, Zack clenched his fists to dig his nails into his palms. He was going to get this and sleep was not going to get the better of him! Not even if it came with a big, soft, warming, cuddly, snooze-inducing, cosy and welcoming, fluffy … STAY AWAKE!

OK. If the method behind Ron and Nancy Spencer’s act was the same as Belinda and Eric Diva’s, then there were certain things that needed to be true in both cases.

(Good start, Zack. Keep going.)

So what did the two acts have in common?

They had both been in theatres, in front of a live audience (the use of the word ‘live’ here might not strictly be accurate for certain members of the Magic Circle, but let’s not get hung up on technicalities just now!).

They had both had the main performer up onstage and the assistant in the audience, moving around with a microphone. Zack smiled slightly at that. It had been kind of cute, that the 1926 reviewer had been so overawed by the awesome new technology – the ability to make sounds louder! Welcome to amplification, world!

They had both had performers who couldn’t see the audience. Belinda had had her back turned. So had Nancy Spencer, plus she was blind to boot. So they both relied on the assistant’s voice to have any idea what was going on.

Zack shivered, despite the duvet. He was still feeling a little chilly from their night-time walk. He would warm up soon, but the shiver brought back memories of the interior of the communications post. The dank, damp smell of cat pee, Jonny burbling technospeak as he made the call.

No video, only audio …

‘WELL, DUH!’ Zack shouted into the dark. From different places in the room came the sound of two bodies – one quite short, one very long – elevating from their mattresses, convulsing with surprise and getting tangled up in their sheets.

Zack just lay there, grinning. Jonny fumbled for his bedside lamp. One of his long arms swung round in the darkness and knocked it off the stand with a crash.

‘Oops!’

Alex was more successful in turning on his bedside light.

‘OK, spill – you’ve thought of something, haven’t you!’ Jonny swung his long legs out of bed and sat on the mattress, hands together, eyebrows raised as he looked at his friend.

Zack grinned at them, then, without warning, jumped out of bed into the middle of the room, where he struck a pose.

‘I’ve only solved it!’ he said. ‘I have only gone and solved it!’ He wiggled his hips from side to side. ‘The world famous, the amazing, the one, the only Zackary Q. X. Harrison –’

‘Those aren’t your middle initials,’ Jonny objected.

‘Who cares, it sounds good! Because I have only gone and simultaneously solved the most titillating telepathy puzzle and the most vexing vanishing act in the history of the world! Ladies and gentlemen: I have done it!’

Alex and Jonny looked at Zack, then at each other, then back at Zack.

‘There’s no ladies here,’ Alex pointed out.

Zack strode over to the wall and thumped it.

‘Hey, Sophie!’ he shouted at the wallpaper. ‘I solved it!’

There was an immediate thump from the other side of the wall, which to anyone who could understand the ancient and oft-derided language of Thumpish basically meant, ‘I’ll be right there!’

Alex poked his fingers behind his glasses to rub his eyes.

‘OK,’ he said sleepily, ‘talk us through it?’