Magic Short 15: The Sucker

Martin looked out into the audience and said that he needed a sucker for the next illusion. From the wings a stage hand pushed a four foot high metal cylinder that had a small housing on top from which trailed a power lead and a wire reinforced hose of white plastic; the effect was to give the thing the appearance of an industrial vacuum cleaner.

Martin scanned the audience to find his volunteer, someone who would be willing to take part in the effect without spoiling things by being over-modest or blasé about it. The young woman in the fourth row was asked to come up on stage to help with the illusion. While she made her way forward, another stagehand pushed another cylinder onto the stage; this one was six feet tall but only two and a half feet in diameter. The audience could see into the cylinder, because the door on the front was made of a clear material. The stagehand opened the door, while Martin the Mage greeted the chosen audience member.

Cheryl was excited and nervous, as she made her way forward. The magician had proved to be amazing, but she felt she would want to know what she was going to be participating in before committing to taking part. She also felt that the opportunity to be the centre of attention for this audience was too good to be passed up.

After the mandatory introductions, Martin asked Cheryl what she thought of vacuum cleaners.

Cheryl jumped at the chance to appear witty and followed Martin's opening remark for this illusion, by saying, "They suck!" She blushed slightly, then added by way of clarification, "Vacuum cleaners are a boring necessity of modern life, but not something you'd expect to see in a magic show, right?"

"Quite right, generally, but I have here one the most powerful vacuum cleaners known to man; it not only has a 'boost' button for those stubborn bits of stuff that, when you run the head over them, refuse to come until you pick them up and put them back, but it also has a 'super-boost' button for when 'boost' is not enough."

"Ok, but that's not magic; a vacuum cleaner is a vacuum cleaner, nothing more to be said."

"Under normal circumstances, I would agree. But tonight the excitement is going to revolve around you and the vacuum cleaner."

Cheryl's expression changed and her stance took on a more cautious aspect. "What's going to happen?"

"That's the problem," admitted Martin, "I'm not quite sure. I have a bet with another magician that I can't make use of a piece of equipment that is delivered on the day of the show and feature it. This morning he delivered the vacuum cleaner and I was racking my brains until lunch as to what to do with it. Then I had this idea and quickly adapted the rest of the kit you see here."

Martin turned Cheryl to face the kit. "The plan is that I put you into the cabinet there and connect the hose to the top and switch on the vacuum cleaner. You will be sucked up the hose and I let you out of the body of the vacuum cleaner moments later. I guess it is your standard, transposition illusion, but I did not really have a lot of time to come up with anything more creative."

"Have I got this straight? I'll be getting the tall cabinet, then you'll switch on the vacuum, then moments later I'll have disappeared from the cabinet and you'll let me out of the cleaner."

"Well, that's that plan, but I did not get to test it as much as I would really like so it may not work at all. In that case I have a standby illusion so that I don't end with a flop."

"I guess that's okay." Cheryl did not sound as if she was any more confident than the words she used.

"Good, first we need to check that things are working and that this is going to do the job." Martin pulled a square of cloth from his jacket pocket and handed it to his volunteer. "Once I have the vacuum connected and switched on, wave that inside the cabinet and we'll see how powerful this thing really is." The magician took up the end of the hose, climbed onto a step on the side of the cabinet and soon had the end of the hose locked to a hole in the top. Showing a bit of athleticism, Martin leapt down and prodded a button on the top of the shorter cylinder.

The motor in the housing began to whine and there was the sound of moving air as it went into the hose. Cheryl took this as her cue to wave the cloth inside the tall cabinet. She could feel the air rushing upward and was not surprised when the cloth in her hand was sucked upwards. Then she lost her grip on the fabric and the cloth flew upward and was sucked into the hose.

Martin saw this and switched off the motor. He released a catch and opened the lid of the stockier cylinder. He pulled the cloth from inside and invited Cheryl to check that there was nobody and nothing hiding inside; which she did. The magician lowered the lid and reset the catch.

"That seemed to work nicely," he commented. "Now to try it with you." At Cheryl's nervous glance, he added , "There's one addition to the set up, so that you don't get scratched by the edge of the hole as you pass into the tube." He held out a hand and caught a large mesh bag, thrown from the wings.

"Might I ask that you take off your shoes, because I don't want the bag damaged."

While Cheryl balanced on each foot in turn, to lift the other so that she could pull of the mid-height heels, Martin shook the bag out to show then audience that it was a bag of a black mesh fabric with one seam up one side and a circle of double thickness sewn in for a base. Some of the more observant noticed the metal rings sewn on little tags around the base and the mouth of the bag.

Martin gathered the bag up and placed the base on the perforated base of the cabinet, hooking the rings to catches in the floor of the cabinet.

"That's set up, so now I need you to step into the cabinet, then I'll pull up the bag and hook it into the end of the hose; that way you won't scratch yourself when you get sucked up the pipe."

Cheryl stepped into the cabinet, with no expectation of anything unexplainable happening to her, but still a little nervous of being asked to do something more bizarre than what had happened already. With his temporary assistant turned to face front, Martin lifted the top edge of the bag up her body and rapidly connected the rings at the mouth of the hose. He then swung the clear plastic door of the cabinet shut and latched it.

The audience could see Cheryl through the mesh of the bag, as she glance upwards with concern as Martin moved over to the squat cylinder of the vacuum cleaner. For a moment his hand hovered over the on switch, then he withdrew it. "I'll be just a moment," he said. He darted into the wings and returned about ten seconds later, after some shouting was heard backstage. With the help of a stagehand, he was dragging on to the stage, a flood light on a stand. He swiftly set it up behind the apparatus that was already on stage pointing it nearly straight up. "For those that have not cottoned on to what that is for; it's to backlight the hose so that you can see the shadow of Cheryl as she is sucked down the hose. It will also help me find where I need to squeeze the tube if she were to get stuck."

They saw Cheryl's expression take a turn for the more worried, because Martin was talking about when she would be sucked through the hose, not if, and also he raised the possibility that she might get stuck. She took a moment to wonder if she should demand to be released, but before she could decide, Martin had pressed the switch and her world narrowed to the area of the cabinet and the gale blowing upward passed her body and attempting to lift the skirt of her dress.

While the vacuum cleaner whined and the wind roared in Cheryl's ears, Martin went over to the tall cabinet and began to rotate it. As Cheryl was lost from the sight of the audience, some of them noticed a faint shadow transit the backlit hose.

As the tall cabinet was turned to face the audience once more, some were expecting it to empty, others were expecting Cheryl to still be there as a means of ramping up the tension. What they got was Cheryl, but it appeared that her dress had gone missing. She was trying to supplement the modesty provided by her underwear by wrapping her arms round herself. Martin rushed to the powerful suction device and slapped the on/off switch. Cheryl's hair, which had been standing straight up from her head, flopped.

"For a first go, that seemed to go well." Martin opened the top of the vacuum cleaner and fished out Cheryl's dress. Cheryl made some moves, as if she expected him to return it to her, but instead he draped it over the hose near the sucker, commenting that there was not much point in returning it to Cheryl just yet, because it would only come off again.

"Let's see if the 'Boost' button does the trick!" The cleaner whined back into life and Cheryl's hair stood up again. Martin smacked a big green button, leading to the whine increasing in pitch and volume. Cheryl felt the chill caused by the increased wind-speed and hugged herself tighter.

As nothing else seemed to be happening, Martin went to turn Cheryl's cabinet again. With the rotation done, he stood back to see if anything had changed and allow the audience to see it if it had.

After Cheryl, Martin was the first to notice what the effect of the extra power had been. Cheryl responded to it by moving her hands and arms to cover for the modesty that her underwear was no longer covering, since it had been ripped from her body. Martin silenced the cleaner and pulled out Cheryl's underwear, which he briefly displayed for the benefit of the slow thinkers in the audience who had not already noticed that Cheryl was now naked.

"Well, that nearly worked. Maybe 'Super-boost' will do the trick." Despite Cheryl's disapproving expression, he switched the device back on, then slapped the 'Boost' button and when the noise of the machine's whining was stable, he slapped the purple 'Super-boost' button. He went to rotate the cabinet that held Cheryl. As he did so he could see that she was suspended a couple of inches from the cabinet's floor in the airstream. He shouted at her to raise an arm so that she would fit through the hose more easily. She indicated that she was unwilling to move either arm, because, to her, her modesty was more important than the success of his trick or if he won some bet with another magician. She wanted this to be over and to be back into her clothes.

As the front of the cabinet went out of view a shadow began to move along the hose from the cabinet towards the suction device. but it stopped about half way.

As the clear side of the cabinet came back into view, some people cheered, because they thought that Cheryl was no longer in the cabinet, but the shadow in the hose was still there in the half nearest the tall cabinet.

Some eagle-eyed observers spotted a naked leg hanging down into the cabinet from the hole in the top where the hose was attached. Martin had spotted it too and opened the front of the cabinet in the hope that the extra availability of air would help push Cheryl down the hose. The only thing that this achieved was to draw the entire audience's attention to the apparent situation that Cheryl had been sucked into the hose and got jammed before one of her legs could make it into the tube.

The second thing Martin tried was more successful. He shook the tube with the intent of straightening out any kinks in the hose that Cheryl might be caught on. The partial success of this was that the shadow moved down the tube a few feet and the exposed leg was pulled into the hose. A second side-effect of this was that a hand emerge through a hole in the hose it appeared to have accidentally ripped.

The final thing the magician did was to disconnect the hose from the top of the tall cabinet and tug on it so that the tube was straighter. The vacuum cleaner was making a distressing whine, then there was a thud and the motor stopped.

He rushed to the vacuum cleaner and threw open the lid. From inside the cleaner's body stood a dazed looking Cheryl, who quickly got out of there by some steps on the inside of the cylinder. She was relieved not to be naked, but surprised to be in a fancy maids outfit, of a short black dress with a starch white lace headpiece and an apron.