Cheers rose up from the crowd before petering out as the stage remained empty. A nervous silence descended, while people shuffled their feet and waited for something to happen. Even the host seemed anxious, repeatedly checking his watch and exchanging uneasy glances with the organizers. He was just about to walk back out to deliver some impromptu and potentially tragic fiction about the fate of El Magnifico when every light in the venue went out. Only when a resonant voice emerged from the gloomy enclave of the stage did the audience realize that the power cut was deliberate.
“Harry Houdini once said, ‘My brain is the key that sets my mind free,’ ” intoned El Magnifico. He let the words fade out for effect before a single spotlight revealed his presence in the middle of the stage.
A hushed excitement rippled through the crowd.
“But even Houdini couldn’t do what a ten-year-old Italian boy named Benedetto Supino did. While sitting in a dentist’s waiting room in 1982, little Benedetto set fire to a comic book he was reading. He didn’t use matches or a cigarette lighter. No. Benedetto Supino used his mind! And tonight, in front of your very eyes, via the power of pyrokinesis, I’m about to do the same.”
A second spotlight beamed down in front of the stage. Sitting in the middle of the bright white light was a podium, and sitting on the podium was a stuffed panda toy.
“Before I begin, I’d like to warn you not to try this at home,” said El Magnifico. “Due to the incredible amount of energy required for this particular feat, the human head has been known to explode while attempting pyrokinesis, so not only am I about to show you something that you’ve never seen before, nor ever will again, I’m also risking my very life in the process.”
At the mention of a possible exploding head, everybody shuffled forward. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony began to drift over the crowd.
Placing his fingertips on his temples, El Magnifico flexed his jaw and stared at the bear. His face began to tremble like a kettle coming to boil and he frowned so deeply that his eyebrows overlapped. A high-pitched sound emerged from his lips that caused Jack the dog to start barking backstage; but sixty seconds later the bear looked no closer to being immolated, something it seemed almost smug about as it grinned at the crowd from the giant television screen. Nobody saw Derek the rabbit lollop along the hem of the stage and disappear beneath the judges’ table, their eyes fixed firmly on the quivering magician who had now turned such a violent shade of red that several paramedics had gathered nearby.
As one minute became two and two became three, boos rose up from the front of the crowd and rapidly spread until everybody was jeering, including the judges. Undeterred by the growing dissent, El Magnifico redoubled his efforts. He focused intently on the bear, staring at the toy as if he didn’t just want to cremate it but will it out of existence entirely. Just when he was about to be dragged away by the security staff who had appeared on either side of the stage, a huge gasp went up from the crowd as the judges’ table burst into flames. Even El Magnifico looked shocked as Martin slapped at his flaming trousers while Sarah, despite not actually being on fire, screamed and rolled around on the ground until the fire crew proceeded to blast them both with fire extinguishers. Realizing he’d actually managed to set something on fire—not the right thing, for the panda hadn’t even broken a sweat, but something—El Magnifico’s body started to tremble again, this time with fits of laughter. He didn’t notice the fire crew dragging the charred corpse of Derek the rabbit out from under the table, the electrical cable he’d unwisely chosen to snack on still firmly clamped between his blackened jaws.
The host lingered on the side of the stage farthest from El Magnifico.
“El Magnifico, ladies and gentlemen,” he said a little unsurely.
The magician took an extravagant bow before swaggering off the stage like someone who was already ten grand richer.
“Well, this competition’s really heating up!” said the host.
Nobody laughed or even bothered to groan, far too shocked by what they’d just witnessed.
“There’s only one more act to go before the judges decide on the winner,” he continued. “Will it be better than the rest? We’re about to find out, so please raise the proverbial roof for our final performance. We’ve had enough chaos tonight, so now it’s time for a little… Pandamonium!”
CHAPTER 33
Danny peered out from behind the curtain, his pulse galloping and his heart pounding so fiercely that every nervous beat made the mangy fibers of his black-and-white chest fur twitch.
A single strobe flickered in time to the music that began to pump from the speakers, exposing the stage every four or five seconds with a brilliant burst of bright white light. Down in the crowd, Ivan cheered as if Ukraine had just won Eurovision and Mo whistled so loudly that his hearing aid malfunctioned. Others watched with a numb sense of duty, convinced that whatever was about to happen couldn’t trump the experience of seeing the judges flambéed with mind power.
The longer the stage remained empty, the more impatient the crowd became, and just when the boos were about to ring out, a figure emerged from the darkness, revealed by the flash of the strobe. The shape returned a few seconds later in another blinding flicker of white. A third and a fourth flash quickly followed as the beat grew more intense, and when the intro reached its peak in a drumroll of sound that came to a halt with an eerie silence, the stage remained illuminated just long enough for the crowd to get a proper glimpse of the mysterious figure in the middle of it. Some people whispered “Rat.” Others said “Raccoon.” “Badger” was also mentioned. Several variations of “What the fuck is that?” could be heard in different sections of the crowd. A few children cried. The lead singer of God Knows What muttered something about the devil. Nobody knew what they were looking at, but nobody could look away.
Danny stared ahead of him, frozen with fear. He felt like a first-time skydiver waiting to jump, and the longer he stood there, the more time he had to contemplate just how many things could go wrong, until he couldn’t for the life of him remember a time when any of this seemed like a good idea.
He tried to move, but his body wouldn’t listen. He couldn’t even feel his arms and legs, never mind encourage them to dance. He momentarily thought he might be having a heart attack, and when he realized he wasn’t he thought about faking one, dropping to the floor and pretending to be dead until a stretcher arrived to carry him away. He squinted through the lights at the faceless crowd in the hope that somewhere, out there, a rogue assassin with a bullet to spare would put him out of his misery; but the longer he stared, the more he saw that the crowd wasn’t faceless at all. He could see somebody, vaguely at first but then as clearly as if they were standing right in front of him. He closed his eyes and opened them again, but Liz was still there, watching him with the faintest of smiles, a smile that told him that she was okay, and that he was okay, and that everything was going to be okay just as long as he got his shit together, right now, and danced like he’d never danced before.
So that’s what he did.
He didn’t even know he was moving at first, his body having wrested control from his mind like a passenger taking the wheel from a dead man, and it wasn’t until he heard the crowd roar that he realized he was dancing, the sound surging through him like he’d just been shot in the arse with adrenaline. He cut through the air like the sword of Zorro and he spun with the speed of a weathervane in a hurricane, his mind and body having reconciled their differences and now working in perfect harmony to deliver a show that was worthy of all the hard work and patience (mostly Krystal’s) and the sweat and tears (mostly Danny’s) that had gone into making it.