Play dead

EIGHTY-NINE

5:20 AM

Swann remembered a time when his Father played a venue in West Texas. The Great Cygne had performed a close-up routine at a honky-tonk called Ruby Lee's. When his father refused to reveal the secret of a card routine based on Dai Vernon's Cutting the Aces, he had been taken out back, beaten, his entire act stolen out of the car.

Twenty minutes later, perhaps in drunken remorse, the three men who'd assaulted the Great Cygne came outside with food for the man's young son. As his father lay unconscious in a dusty alley, Joseph ate chicken-fried steak and drank Coca Cola.

It had been this hot that night.

Swann put his hand on the box. Fire and water. Water and flame. There were many variations of the fire illusions. The cremation illusions. Some call the illusion Suttee, the term coming from the name of the goddess Sati who immolated herself because she could not stand living with her father's humiliation over her husband Shiva.

Some illusionists called the effect She, a title inspired by a strange little book by H. Ryder Haggard.

The Great Cygne called it the Fire Grotto. The effect was similar to the Sub Trunk, but that was the original version. This version would be different.

Swann sat in the shadow of the box. The red clock ticked. It was time. He would open the box and begin the final illusion of what the world would know, for as long as history was recorded, as the Seven Wonders.