The masked magician's a.s.sistant lies down in a box with her head and feet sticking out. The magician appears to saw her in half. The halves are separated, yet she steps out all in one piece. How?

THE SECRET.

There are several versions of this illusion. Here, the a.s.sistant simply curls up to avoid the blade. The feet are false ones activated by a motor.

THE MAGIC BOX.

Let's return briefly to the barge to see how Sam is reacting to Kitty's story. She has finished the coffee and Lola is licking the last drops out of the cup. The cats have settled on Sam like a furry duvet, and if it wasn't for the soporific effect of their purring, she wouldn't be nearly as calm.

Besides which, the collective weight of tortoisesh.e.l.ls,

tabbies and Burmese is preventing her from doing much.

"It was a crime of pa.s.sion," continues Kitty. "Candy was jealous. She saw an opportunity and struck. It happened when John asked her to reverse the box truck with him the next moaning."

By which she meant rehea.r.s.e the box trick, an illusion that is simple but ingenious: 1. Lovely a.s.sistant climbs into box. Lid is closed.

2. Magician plunges real sword into the box seemingly straight into a.s.sistant's heart.

3. Magician spins box, then opens it.

4. a.s.sistant steps out smiling and unperforated.

This trick has been performed many times but rarely with a real sword. Usually, a magician uses a trick sword; the blade snaps back into the hilt under the slightest pressure so it can't pierce the victim. Or he swaps the sword for a rubber one. If a real sword is used, the box is made big enough for the a.s.sistant to roll out of the way of the blade.

John's trick was different. His box was very narrow, even for someone as slim as Candy. The sword was real; there was no room for even the tiniest a.s.sistant to escape the deadly blade by shifting sideways.

In fact, the box was deeper than it looked; an optical illusion achieved by painting lines on the lid which tricked the eye into thinking it was flat, rather than bowed.

Kitty had tailor-made the box to fit Candy. It was just deep enough for her to grab hold of two rings screwed into the underside of the lid, hidden in the lining. These rings gave her enough leverage to flip herself over so that her legs were at the opposite end of the box. To picture the movement, imagine a snake doing a head-over-heels.

John could then thrust his sword into the box knowing that Candy's heart was up the other end and that the blade would slip safely through the gap between her knees. He'd then spin the box, giving Candy time to flip back again. When he opened the lid, she was in the same position as when the audience last saw her; they'd never work out how she'd cheated death.

Timing is everything; if you practise the manoeuvre twenty times a day for weeks on end, you'll escape without a scratch. But if you're a novice? The trick is lethal.

With that in mind, Candy interrupted her sister from her sewing and told her that she couldn't possibly rehea.r.s.e the box trick today, she had to shop for wedding shoes. Would Christa be an angel and stand in for her? Oh, please, darling, before someone else buys them. If Christa wore her costume the pink silk with the matching gloves and just climbed into the magic box and kept her mouth shut, John would never realize they'd swapped places. "It's perfectly safe," she told her. "It's only a pretend sword. Just breathe in and stay still." She never mentioned that the only way to avoid being stabbed was to grab the rings and flip herself over a move her sister could never have mastered.

Christa didn't have the heart to say no. She let Candy lace her tightly into the costume and hurried to the rehearsal. Little did Candy know that Kitty had overheard her giving Christa the wrong instructions, and as soon as she left to go shopping, Kitty ran to the make-shift stage in the bas.e.m.e.nt to warn John. But to her horror, Christa was already inside the box and there was the Dark Prince, sword raised, ready to plunge it straight through the lid.

"Stop!" Kitty screamed. "It's not Candy in the box! It's Christa."

She opened the box and helped the bewildered Christa back onto her feet. She'd been seconds from death, and when she learnt that Candy had plotted for her to die under John's sword, she collapsed. The Dark Prince was aghast. Why would Candy do such an evil thing to her own sister?

"She saw Sam's blonde streak," Kitty told him. "She knows you're the father, John."

Christa, somewhat delirious, began to panic. "We have to convince Candy that he isn't or she'll kill herself!"

It might seem odd that Christa was so concerned about her sister's welfare after what she'd just done. Plotting to kill someone in cold blood is bad enough; tricking your fiance into doing the dirty deed for you is unspeakable. Even so, Christa felt she was to blame, despite John insisting it was all his fault. Seeing her in such distress and not knowing what to do, he asked Kitty for help.

Kitty's plan was bizarre, but there was a chance it might work. She fetched red ink, black ink and an onion; props they would use to trick Candy into believing John had killed Christa. There was no time to explain the logic behind it; they just had to follow her instructions. Christa was to climb back into the box and play dead. John was to rehea.r.s.e the lines he would say to Candy. Meanwhile, Kitty busied herself with the details necessary to complete the illusion.

When Candy returned, she found John Tabuh slumped over the box, grieving for his fiancee.

"I have killed Candy, the only girl I have ever loved!"

Red-eyed and weeping (thanks to Kitty's peeled onion), John wondered aloud how the trick had gone so fatally wrong. Then, in a dramatic gesture, he threatened to fall on his sword, insisting that life wasn't worth living now his beloved Candy was dead.

Delighted that she meant so much to him after all, Candy wrestled the sword away, flung her arms around him and confessed to the swap. "Darling, it's Christa inside the box, not me!"

John pretended to be greatly surprised, peered inside the box and scratched his head, his eyes darting from the "dead" twin to the live one. Faking confusion, he raised the lid just enough for Candy to see Christa's bleeding "corpse" (clever use of red ink).

Now John ranted about having blood on his hands. What had he done, he asked Candy, that was so unforgivable, she'd tricked him into killing his own wardrobe mistress?

At the mention of the word "mistress" a word Kitty had told John to stress Candy bellowed: "Mistress? I'll say she was your mistress! You are the father of her brat!" And she yanked off Sam's bonnet to expose the blonde streak only to find that it had gone! Not for a second did she suspect that the streak had been disguised with black ink.

"The baby has no blonde streak! You're paranoid mad!" Kitty shouted with such conviction, Candy began to wonder if she had imagined the whole affair. Now she must pretend the whole thing was a tragic accident or John would call off the wedding.

"Poor Christa!" she cried, her body wracked with fake sobs. "I never asked her to swap places, she insisted! She wanted me to have those shoes; that's the kind of sweet girl she was. I told her, if you must do it, be sure to lie in the box with your head at the safe end."

Kitty wanted to scream "Liar!" but she bit her tongue. If Candy knew she'd overheard, she'd also know that Kitty would have rushed straight to tell John. He'd have stopped the trick and Christa would still be alive. Candy had to believe her sister was dead. To bang the point home and to make herself look unbiased, Kitty accused them both of murder and said she was going to the police.

John stood in Kitty's way and a fine piece of acting it was saying he'd rather die than go to prison. Again he threatened to fall on his sword. This time he actually nicked his chin on the blade, whereupon Kitty rushed to his aid with a plaster and withdrew her threat. As both women fought to tend the bleeding patient, John announced his master stroke the twist in the illusion that would allow him to marry Christa and leave the country without Candy ever knowing. All this so that he wouldn't break his fiancee's heart.

There was, he claimed, an ancient chant that his father had used to resurrect Lola. It didn't work on people, but he believed there was another chant that did. He'd been given a list of mystics, one of whom must know this chant. With that in mind, John planned to travel the world with Christa's mummified body in the magic box until he found someone to resurrect her. As soon as she'd come back to life, he'd come home and marry Candy. There was only one condition; she must never tell anyone how Christa died, or there could be no happy outcome.

Although John made it sound as if resurrecting Christa was simply a matter of time, Candy wasn't convinced. But he kept stressing that he was putting himself out to get her off a murder trial and that Christa wouldn't be lying dead if Candy hadn't made her feel obliged to swap places for the sake of a pair of shoes.

Rather than upsetting him by saying, "What if you fail?" she wailed, "Can I come too?"

He wouldn't hear of it. "The world is a dangerous place," he said. "I would never forgive myself if anything happened to you."

John warned that he might be gone for years and that if he didn't return, it wasn't for want of love; he'd simply succ.u.mbed to a tropical disease, drowned in a swamp or been eaten by a tiger. Seeing her face fall, he added hastily that, for all he knew, the chap who knew the chant might live nearby in Watford, perhaps in which case they'd be married by Christmas. He then asked Kitty to look after Sam until he'd tracked down Bingo Hall, to whom he would return the baby Bingo was the father after all. Naturally Kitty agreed, as it was her idea to say this in the first place. All that remained was for John to kiss Lola and Candy goodbye.

"But where shall I go?" Candy cried. "I can't stay here with the ghost of my sister!" She was afraid it would haunt her, perhaps.

"Move into Christa's flat at the weekend," said John. "Until then, stay here. Kitty will keep the ghost away while you grieve."

Grieve? Candy Khaan's heart was hardly bleeding for her sister; she stuck her tongue out behind her hand, painted on her most alluring smile and begged John not to go; what would she do for money? There was no reply. The Dark Prince had vanished in a puff of smoke.

And so had his magic box.

THE CUP AND BALL TRICK.

Using three cups and three coloured b.a.l.l.s, the masked magician makes the b.a.l.l.s pa.s.s through the solid bottoms of cups, jump from cup to cup, disappear from the cup and then reappear. How?

THE SECRET.

There are many variations of this illusion. This one uses sleight of hand.

1. A ball is shown to be transferred from the right to the left hand, whilst really, it is retained in the right by finger-palming.

2. A cup is then lifted to show there is nothing underneath it and, when it is put down, the finger-palmed ball is released under the cup.

3. The ball is now shown to have vanished from the left hand and the cup is lifted to show the ball has "travelled" there.

KATY JONES.

"Oh! So my father kissed Candy goodbye but he never kissed me," sulks Sam, ignoring the enormity of what she's just been told and fixating as people do on the smallest of details.

"He wanted to kiss you," insists Kitty, "but we'd just managed to convince Candy that you weren't his b.o.o.by. A display of affection towards you would have ruined our illusion."

"So where did Mum and Dad go?"

Back to Christa's flat in St Peter's Square. Candy had been told that John had gone there to hunt for Bingo Hall's address. In reality, John and Christa had gone to the flat for two reasons: 1. To make travel plans: Christa had hastily copied down the names on the witch doctor's list into a new notebook in case the tropical climate faded the ink and made it illegible. The original notebook was stored in a trunk in the attic, safely hidden in the goatskin pouch. Kitty had promised to come to the flat with further items necessary for their journey abroad, her excuse to Candy being that she'd gone there to mummify Christa.

2. To get married: the plan was to slip away and get married in secret. They would then sneak back to the warehouse, collect Sam and the trunk from Kitty, and leave the country to complete John's mission. They would then return to his father and settle down as a family until the old man died, whereupon John would take over as witch doctor.

Those were their plans. They left the flat to get married, leaving Candy to move in as John had told her to. But then things went horribly wrong. All John and Christa's intentions were destroyed by the warehouse fire.

To be fair to Aunt Candy, when she'd left the flat in St Peter's Square that morning, she had no intention of starting an inferno. She'd been drinking, and the more she drank, the more it seemed like a good idea to visit Kitty to see if Bingo Hall had taken his brat or if John had been in touch. Picture this scene at the warehouse: Sam is asleep in the crib, tired after her morning bath. Lola is washing nappies. Kitty is standing on the top rung of a ladder with a blowtorch, putting the finishing touches to the Egyptian temple she's constructing.

It's a magnificent work of art over twenty feet high and hung with elaborate curtains, only they're drooping because the heavy fabric has split one of the curtain rings. As Kitty doesn't have a spare ring, she'll have to solder the broken one together. It'll take forever to take the curtains down, so she decides to fix the ring with her blowtorch while they're still hanging.

We've all done it, haven't we? Taken the shortcut. Fine if you've just burnt the toast; you can sc.r.a.pe the cinders off and no harm's done. But what if you're up a ladder with a blowtorch and a drunken contortionist arrives unannounced, demanding to know if her dead sister's brat has been claimed?

What if that same contortionist looks in the crib, sees the blonde streak in the baby's hair, now that the ink's washed out, and realizes she's been tricked? What if she demands to know the truth and rocks the ladder so violently, the blowtorch sets the curtains on fire?

The warehouse fills with smoke; the flames spread. Kitty jumps out of the window. Candy escapes through the back door and is followed home by Lola, who climbed out of a window with Sam in her arms. Everything is destroyed except for a silver rattle leading the newly-wed Mr and Mrs Tabuh to believe that their baby had perished in the fire.

Unable to find Kitty or confront Candy, and prevented from getting into the flat because it's boarded up, they leave the country without their trunk, which remains in the attic. If only we could put them out of their misery and tell them that their daughter is alive and living on a barge, and is desperately trying to find them both. Right now, Sam is doing her best to persuade Kitty to ask the ancient spirits where her parents are.

I wouldn't believe in automatic writing but for the fact that this book is the work of someone else entirely. I'm scribbling away like a slave, but who put the thoughts in my head? My muse? The spirits? Who knows. The real author refuses to take any credit, but, believe me, I don't have time to invent all this stuff. I'm merely a conduit, like Kitty.

For some reason, Kitty is reluctant to contact the spirits on Sam's behalf. She says her pen has run out of oink. When Sam offers her a pencil instead, she says she has a hat ache.

"A headache? Poor you. When the pain goes, will you try for me then, Kitty?"

"The pain never goes."

Kitty's trying to wriggle out of it, so Sam goads her. "You can't do it, can you? You're not the reincarnation of an Egyptian priestess at all."

"Yes, I am." Kitty's insistent in a way that's wholly believable. Reincarnation could be proved, she says, if the dates and facts of her past life could be linked to a genuine historical character it's just that no one's done it yet.

"But how do you know you're the reincarnation of an Egyptian priestess, Kitty?"

"Get dressed and I'll tell you."

Sam's outfit needs a wash. Kitty takes her clothes, which are folded neatly at the end of the bed, and gives her a robe. It's too large, but it will do until the green trousers and sparkly blazer are dry. Having changed, Sam goes up onto the deck to find Kitty doing the washing in a bowl. Lola has her own bowl and is dunking her woolly monkey up and down in the suds. It's an unusual sight an orang-utan, a masked woman and a girl in a ringmaster's hat washing their smalls but it's a homely scene; the ideal opportunity for Kitty to tell Sam about her childhood which I will now relate.

Kitty's real name was Katy. Her mother was a fortune-teller, her father trained horses, and they lived in a caravan. Being poor and having two other babies to feed, they were delighted when a rich, childless couple Mr and Mrs Jones asked to adopt their youngest daughter.

Katy Jones had a normal, happy childhood until the age of nine when she had an accident which changed her life. She tripped over a cat on the stairs, landed on her head and, when the doctor arrived, was p.r.o.nounced dead. It was a terrible shock for the Joneses, but nothing like the one they were about to receive.

When the doctor returned to lay out Katy's body, he found her sitting up in bed, laughing merrily as if she had never died. Thrilled as Mr Jones was to see his adopted daughter alive, he was furious with the doctor for making such a callous mistake and demanded an explanation.

Either the doctor had been mistaken or there was none he swore on his mother's life that the last time he checked, Katy's breathing had ceased. It was a miracle; he gave up medicine and entered a monastery where he took a vow of silence.

However, the accident on the stairs wasn't without side-effects. Although Katy remained well, a trip to the British Museum revealed that all was not as it seemed. For the moment she entered the Egyptian Gallery, she went wild. Normally a quiet child, she now clung to the mummy cases and screamed that she wanted to be "with her own people" in a voice that her adoptive mother didn't recognize. At first Mrs Jones thought Katy must be referring to her real parents but no.

In the middle of the gallery there was a model of a temple dedicated to the G.o.ddess Bastet. Katy sat down in front of it, declared that this was her real home and refused to move. To calm her down, Mrs Jones gave her a pencil and paper and suggested that she made a drawing of the temple. Katy began to sketch with great concentration. Suddenly, as if her hand was being moved by some unseen force, she scribbled down a series of hieroglyphics. She couldn't understand them at first and insisted on showing them to the curator who translated: Welcome, Fey Ra! Welcome high priestess, handmaiden to Bastet; we are your servants.

Katy never forgot the experience and, ever after, insisted on being called Fey Ra. The Joneses didn't like it, but as she refused to answer to "Katy", they nicknamed her Kitty Bastet, partly because of the G.o.ddess and partly because the episode had been triggered by tripping over the cat.