Magic Short 22: Hecklers Had

Marty may not have been a world-class magician or the most handsome, but he did his job well and rarely suffered a knock back when he offered his company to a lady. This evening he was not doing quite as well as usual; he was distracted. The distraction was a pair of young women in the front row that speculated loudly on how he was achieving the feats that he and Audrey, his assistant, presented. It took a while for his fuse to burn down, by which time he had a plan, which he prepared during the interval.

Marty could not decide if he was glad or disappointed to see that the twosome had returned for the second act. He kept his cool while demonstrating the Chinese linking rings.

As Audrey went into the wings with the rings, Marty stood forward and asked the two whether he was boring them.

The redhead seemed surprised to be addressed, "Sorry? You talking to us?" When Marty confirmed that he was, she said, "Well, to be honest, your performance is good and all, but you haven't done anything that we haven't seen done on TV a dozen times over."

The blonde added, "What she said. We've been waiting to see you do something that we haven't seen a million times before."

With audience muttering at this pause in the flow of the show, Marty knew he had to get things moving. "It sounds to me, that you are just the right young ladies to help me out revealing a trick for the rest of the audience. Please, come up on the stage."

Having been singled out, the two did not feel that they could refuse the chance to be on stage and soon climbing the few steps to reach it.

Marty did not make a lot of the introductions, except to establish that the redhead, Reagan, and blonde, Brianna, were students at the local university.

"So, I invited you come up here to help demonstrate an illusion and reveal it. Any ideas, which trick I plan to reveal with your help?"

"No idea, obviously," sneered Reagan. "I hope it isn't something lame like a card trick or the stick and tassels trick."

"Any ideas, Brianna?"

"Not a clue, but I hope it's one of the big ones, although I don't fancy being in a sword box, even if it is a trick."

"You're both in luck, because this is what we'll be demonstrating for the benefit of the rest of the audience." On cue Audrey push the apparatus on to the stage. It took the audience and the two volunteers a few moments to work out what they were seeing, because whatever it was, was made entirely of clear rigid plastic. "What do you reckon?" Marty prompted.

Reagan was the first to work out something to say. "It looks like an oversized thin model sawing box, but clear. I can't see any fake feet though."

"That's exactly it. You will be helping me demonstrate how sawing a woman in half is done. And there are no fake feet, because you are going to be the fake feet."

Reagan seemed to take this in her stride. "So, what do I need to do?"

"This part of the illusion," Marty said for the audience's benefit, "would be done backstage, so that the spectators did not know about it. But because we are demonstrating the method and it would be totally obvious with this transparent piece of kit, we'll do it here and now.

"If you could come to this end and take your shoes off, Reagan, then we can get you situated. Brianna, please remove your shoes too." Both young ladies complied.

"Of course, usually the two assistants would be dressed in the same costume so that it would easy to mistake Reagan's legs and feet for Brianna's legs and feet, but we'll not bother with that, because it makes it clearer what is going on, with the contrast between Reagan's short blue skirt and check shirt and Brianna's full-length cream dress."

"I'm ready!" announced Reagan. "Where do you want me?"

"Well, the obvious answer is here at the feet end, as you are going to be the feet. The tricky part is how we put you into the box." He opened the lid to the box and then opened another panel that lined up with the bottom of the box. "As you can see, the box has a false bottom and the table is hollow. What I want you to do is to lie in the table, then I'll tuck the bottom of the box back in place and you can fold your legs down so that you're inside the bottom half of the box."

Using an offered hand to steady herself, Reagan scooted back into the box and then sat in the thick table. "In case you were wondering, yes, this table is thicker than most, because we never have an idea of how big the helpers are going to be, and this one does not have the deceptive angles that usually disguise the thickness of the tables."

Continuing his instructions, Marty said, "I need you to lie down there, then I can put the floor back in the box." Reagan leaned back using one hand on the edge of the box to support herself and the other to hold her skirt in place. She found a soft spot to rest her head and released the edge of the box. She also had to release her restraining hand on her skirt, but by that time the floor of the box was sufficiently in place to partly fulfil that role. Reagan's legs we soon concertinaed inside the bottom half of the box with her body hidden below in the table.

"Now that we have our fake legs assistant in place hiding inside the bottom half of the apparatus, we bring it on stage and begin the illusion with our visible assistant, Brianna. So please come over here and step up into the box."

Brianna came forward and struggled to lift her leg high enough until she pulled up the hem of her dress to mid-thigh. With a helping hand from Marty she stepped up and stood on the floor of the box in the upper half of the apparatus.

"As you can see, the lids that open towards the audience do a good job of concealing how Brianna will be folding herself into this box, but because these are clear, you'll be able to see every move.

"Brianna, I want you to lie down in the box and curl up like you friend has, but with your head sticking out the end of the box.  And Reagan, when Brianna has sat down, you should put your feet out of the bottom of the box. This is when the stocks go in, to give the impression that Brianna is lying flat in the box." Audrey entered with two panels of clear plastic, one of which she handed to Marty to fit over Brianna's neck, the other she fitted to trap Reagan's ankles.

Marty continued his commentary. "In order to fit Brianna into the upper half, we release the floor of the box so that there is more space for her to curl up her legs as we shut the lids." The magician continued to suit his actions to his words by closing the lids and locking them. "We open the side doors of the boxes to show the legs in the bottom box, which with properly costumed assistants would not be obviously the second assistant's legs. Also we open the side of the upper box, and let Brianna put her arm out, partly to give her a little more space in there, but mainly to reinforce the fiction that she is still crammed into the thinness of the box and not as you can see is the case less squashed into a space that is about twice the height.

"I shall dispense with the charade of sawing anyone in two, because you can see that it would be easy with the guides in place to saw through without touching either the known or the unknown assistant. So, I shall just put these clear plastic dividers in place to give you the idea and separate the two parts of the box. And that is all there is to sawing a woman in half, except, of course, no such 'reveal' would be complete without me demonstrating the illusion again in such a way that it cannot be done by the means I have just outlined. So, Reagan or Brianna, what do you reckon that I could do to saw someone in half and convinced people that I wasn't using what I have just demonstrate with your help?"

Reagan was the first to respond. "You could put your assistant into this box and saw her in half, showing that there is no second assistant."

"A decent idea at first sight, but as you will remember from the first half, I've already sawn her in half twice; once lying down and once standing up. And before you suggest it, dividing her into more than two parts has already been done."

"Maybe you can divide someone else, not a trained assistant," suggested Brianna.

"Thank you! I had hoped that you would volunteer."

"But I didn't volunteer; it was only a suggestion," protested Brianna.

"Shall we say that I had already had a similar idea and as you are already in the boxes, it seems the obvious course of action to demonstrate an impossible version of the trick on both of you."

Briana seemed scared and was stammering something about no knowing how to do this trick other than by the method they had been showing. Reagan was actively trying to escape from her confinement in the clear box, but with no noticeable result other than her feet twitching in every direction.

"Now, sawing you at the waist is impractical, because in both your cases I would have to saw through three layers, which besides being a lot of work, would divide you into an unfeasibly large number of pieces that would need putting together again. So I shall be sawing you lengthwise, which means that you had better get yourselves set up symmetrically in your boxes or things could get messy; such as you getting sawn through an eye, which might result in a permanent squint."

Marty manoeuvred the two boxed up volunteers to one side of the stage. Audrey entered from the other side with a contraption that consisted of a stand with an upward pointing chainsaw next to a blade as long as the boxes that contained the struggling volunteers. Over top of the blade section was a clear piece of plastic as deep as the boxes from which hung legs at each end.

Reagan glimpsed the device and stopped struggling. "What the hell is that? It looks dangerous."

"That's what I plan to cut you in half with. And of course it is dangerous; if I do this wrong I could easily lose a limb; and you wouldn't want that would you? The principle is that I wheel the box to line up with the grooves either side of the blade and push the box through, neatly slicing you and Brianna down the middle. The blade on the other side is to keep you in two pieces while we fit the divider and wheels so that we can show the rest of the audience and each of you that you have really been sawn in two. After that it is a simple matter to clip your two halves together and remove the dividers so that you can get out and return to your seats."

The clamour of protests indicated that the two volunteers were particularly sceptical about surviving being passed through the chainsaw and were not giving the magician's assurances that they would be reassembled and returned to their seats any credence.

To the amusement of the audience, Reagan's box was the first to be steered towards the saw. Audrey

gave a signal that Marty was to stop, while she leaned down and grasped the pull toggle to start the saw's motor. On the second try, the chainsaw burst into life filling the theatre with noise and fumes. No-one in the audience could hear anything said on the stage. The one thing that was said, before Marty shoved the box containing Reagan onto the running chainsaw was, "Look straight up or the cut won't be even and it'll be more difficult to put you back together."

As the audience watched, horror overcame them. Reagan lay folded in the clear box and was run into the whirling chain of the saw which hit the plastic of the box between her feet. It was not long before the pressure from the magician and the viciousness of the teeth resulted in the only thing protecting Reagan's body from the engine powered teeth was gone and the box passed over the blade with the tip jutting a couple of inches above the top of the box. With Audrey's help, the box was pushed over the saw blade and onto the divider sheet. Audrey, tapped something with her foot and the saw's motor subsided to an idle. The magician and assistant busied themselves briefly with locking the plastic sections over the divider sheet to the box and then wheeled it away to the opposite side of the stage from which it had come.

Marty collected Brianna's box, while Audrey fitted a second divider set over the divider sheet. When the equipment was in place, the assistant applied her toe to the throttle of the chainsaw and the magician pushed Brianna, in her box, to follow the same path that her friend had recently navigated. As the blade reached about half-way up the box, Audrey put out her hand to stop the box and put the saw into idle.

"Why did you do that?" asked Marty.

"We can't do this with her head loose on the outside of the box. If the alignment isn't right, I'll have to go and retrieve it from the audience, and I don't want to do that."

"Ok, get something to cover her head, but be quick, because she's nearly done."

Audrey sprinted into the wings in her three inch heels and returned about ten seconds later with a see-through box which she placed over Brianna's head and clipped into place. Then with her toe on the throttle, she helped Marty complete the cut and clip the plastic dividers into place. As Brianna's box rolled from the dividing blade, Audrey, switched off the saw and dragged the equipment back into the wings.

"Of course a lot of you don't believe I have just sawn two women lengthwise with a chainsaw, despite having seen it yourselves. Sadly I can't ask Brianna or Reagan, because the saw passed through their voice-boxes, so they can't speak at the moment so I will have to show instead."

Marty went to Reagan's box, where the audience could see her body trapped in the bottom half and her legs in the upper half and her feet protruding from the end. He turned it slowly through a full turn so that the audience had seen both sides of his victim. Then he turn her stockinged feet to the audience and with Audrey's help pulled the two halves apart until Reagan's feet were three feet apart and then turned the boxes so that the audience could see Reagan's halves. He had soon repeated the procedure with Brianna. He rearranged the four halves so that Reagan's right side had its feet pointing at Brianna's left side, which was head to head with her right side and then Reagan's left side.

He invited those that were interested to come and take a closer look at the divided volunteers, but he did not let people take a look at the other side, because 'they are a mess of internal organs'. The only evidence that either of the volunteers was alive was that when Marty touched Reagan's feet they twitched.

"I guess we had better put the girls back together and return them to there seats for the rest of the show." Marty took the two halves on one side of the stage and put them together and Audrey did the same on the other side. Clips were set and released dropping a pair of plates from each reconstructed box. As the the divider hit the floor both the volunteers screamed, but it quickly became clear that the screams were roller-coaster screams rather than screams of terror or pain.

Magician and assistant, unlocked the lids of the boxes and moved the other impediments to exiting the boxes out of the way, before aiding the volunteers.

As they climbed out of the boxes, the volunteers presented a strange sight. Above the worried looks on their faces the hair was not the same as before both were half red and the other side blonde. Below the blonde half was the cream dress to the bare ankle, but the other side, capped with red hair, the clothes merged into the check flannel shirt, short blue skirt and stockinged leg. Neither volunteer seemed to know what to make of the change or the experience.

Marty shooed them from the stage, giving them the advice to stay behind to get things fixed. For the rest of the show Reagan and Brianna seemed to be deep in conversation, but it was not loud and did not appear to be about the magic.