October 5th.

“I am here with Arthur the Archmage to talk about his show that will be in the Maiden's Theatre from the 7th,” said Susie Sharpson, in her role as 'entertainment reporter' for the local TV news program. “What can we expect?” She tilted the microphone in her hand towards the grey-haired man wearing a white lab coat with various discoloured areas and some scorch marks.

“Well, Susie,” Arthur began. “It will be a similar mix to my other shows, but, with deference to the season, it will have a darker tone and more gore. There will still be some close-up magic, a hypnosis section and plenty of chances for audience participation, but this will be my first show where there has been a 'splashzone' in the auditorium.

“With that in mind, this time I have hired a couple of assistants, so if nobody volunteers, I can still demonstrate the magic, and it has also allowed me to include some story into the show for the first time. Would you like to try some of the magic?”

Susie's face dropped, she had heard lots of stories of reporters, particularly female ones, interviewing magicians and ending up in a magic box and having magic done on them. She did not want to participate, but she would if necessary.

“Don't worry, Susie, we were planning to rehearse the audience participation part, but for a change the audience member gets to be the magician, instead of the assistant. And it'll give you a chance to meet my new assistants.”

Two women appear in the shot. The one dragging a chair with a box on the seat is dressed in a short navy-blue pleated skirt, white blouse and a maroon and silver striped tie. With her hair up in pigtails and her make-up, she was the epitome of the mature naughty school-girl. “This is Hannah, She is usually a waitress, but she's also a 'stand-by assistant' for a magician friend of mine, but he's away on a Halloween cruise.”

The other woman was a taller black woman in a white dress that appeared to be a mesh mini-dress wrapped haphazardly with bandages which had been sewn in place. She was also wearing a bolt through her neck and tall black wig with streaks of white up the sides. She pushed a low bench with a couple of items on. “This is Martha, she's a dancer, who has worked with another friend of mine.”

“Let's start with Hannah, that way Martha can hold a few things that we don't really want to put down.”

Hannah picked up the box from the seat and handed it to Arthur before sitting down. Susie had a look inside the box and saw that it was full of knives. Arthur held the box towards Martha, who took out the knives and held them at the ready. Arthur approached Hannah from in front and slid the back panel from the box and slotted the box onto two pegs sticking out from the back of the chair either side of Hannah's neck. The front panel was then removed and the back panel replaced, trapping Hannah's head inside the box.

Susie and the camera had a look into the head box, to see Hannah looking a little nervously back. Hannah explained, “This'll be the first time I've done this with anyone other than Arthur doing it; I hope it works.”

Arthur put the front panel back in place and then put a hand out towards Martha, She handed him a knife. He took the knife, which he slotted into a hole in the side just behind the front panel. In quick succession he added a pair of knives at the rear of the box and a second one at the front on the opposite side from the first.

“Now, Susie, it's your turn. There are only four more knives left. Martha will hand them to you one by one. All you have to do is push them fully through the remaining slots in the top, bottom and sides of the box”

Martha held out a knife towards Susie. The reporter took it nervously and looked at the nearest side of the head box. She saw a cross shaped slot. “Am I meant to put it in with the blade vertical or across-ways?” she asked.

“It's up to you. Across or up and down, it's your choice. It'll make the arrangement of the blades, once they're in unique to you, so it can't be faked using mirror's or anything like that,” Arthur assured her.

“Are you ready for the next one, Hannah?” Susie called.

“Yeah! Please get on with it; the suspense is killing me!” Hannah replied, a little muffled.

Susie located the blade she held into the vertical section of the crossed slot. “Ok, here it comes.” With a single shove, the blade slid into the box. A pained scream was heard. “Are you alright?”

“What do you think?” came the reply from the box, “You just pushed a dagger into the side of my face.”

Martha held out a second dagger to Susie. Susie took it without enthusiasm, then Arthur guided her to Hannah's other side and pointed out a crossed slot in that side of the box. Susie pushed the blade into the box more because she felt expected to, rather than any desire to do it. There was another scream from inside the box. She glanced at Arthur in an attempt to see if this was what was meant to be happening. She was not reassured by his half smile as he passed her a third knife from Martha.

The magician pointed out a crossed slot in the top of the head box and had Susie slot the knife into it. This time as the reporter pushed the the blade into the box there was no sound from inside the head box; Susie settled for the dubious reassurance that Hannah's body remained upright and the hands in her lap moved slightly.

The other assistant in the Bride of Frankenstein outfit handed the final dagger to Susie and then helped guide its tip to a slot underneath the box. When Susie gingerly pushed the blade into the box, the torso slumped in the chair, but the hands remained in the body's lap and twitched a little.

“Ok, now let's see what you've done,” suggested the magician. He took hold of the handle at the top of the front panel, while positioning Susie to see inside once the panel was lifted and gesturing with the other hand to indicate that the cameraman should find a position where he could see inside too.

The cameraman moved to somewhere where he could see the inside of the box when it was revealed, but also shift to getting Susie's reaction to whatever was or was not inside the box.

Arthur lifted the panel. Susie looked into the box and saw what she hoped was a too realistic mannequin head; it bore an uncomfortably close resemblance to Hannah, but had an eye hanging out of one of the eye sockets.

Having allowed the cameraman to capture Susie's queasy reaction to the box's contents, Arthur replaced the panel.

“That is one of the audience participation things we have lined up. I think we should rehearse the other one, while we have Susie here to act as the volunteer.” While he said this Arthur rearranged the scene so that the bench that Martha had brought in was in front of Hannah's slumped body. He put the cameraman in place of the audience and stood Susie behind the bench. Martha lay on the bench with some evident nervousness.

Soon the rest of the preparations for the jigsaw illusion were in place. The arched stock was over Martha's belly, the efficacy of the electric jigsaw was demonstrated on a piece of wood and the gap between the inner curve of the stock and Martha's toned belly was stuffed with a towel that was streaked with distressing bright red stains.

Those easily distracted from the action in the foreground, and the few that replayed the clip, saw that Hannah's body stopped slumping and began to pulled the daggers from the head box.

In front Susie watched numbly as Arthur slotted the blade of the jigsaw into the nearest side of the stock and wrapped her hand around the handle on the top. After a small adjustment, she was instructed to squeeze the trigger under her finger and push the jigsaw forward so that it passed through Martha's waist, with the promise that it would not hurt Martha.

Susie squeezed and pushed. Almost instantly Martha screamed. Susie tried to stopped and withdraw  the jiggling blade, but found Arthur's guiding hand pushing her hand onward. Shortly before the blade emerged from the far side of the stock Martha seemed to pass out.

The magician removed the stock to show red stains permeating the off-white of the bandage dress along the path the jigsaw appeared to have taken. Behind the scene in the foreground Hannah had removed all the blades and extracted the rear panel from the headbox. She pulled the head box forward and lowered into her lap. She then made a movement that seemed to be intended to pop her loose eye back into its socket, before returning the blades to the box.

Arthur pulled a small bottle from his lab-coat pocket and uncorked it. From the way Susie screwed her face up it released a strong smell. He made a couple of passes with the bottle under Martha's nose, which did the job of bringing her back to her senses.

Arthur stood next to Susie and invited his assistants to flank them. Hannah stepped forward, her white blouse marred by dribbles of red down her collar. When Martha stood up the bottom part of her dress slid down the smooth legs revealing that all she was wearing under it below her waist was a g-string miniscule enough to required that her groin be blurred to be allowed on TV.

From the pocket where he re-stowed the smelling-salts, Arthur pulled an envelope. “I would be honoured if you could attend show, particularly if you could catch our last show on the 31st.”

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October 31st.

Susie had done her best to find an excuse not to attend Arthur's show, but she ended up at the Maiden's theatre; her producer had said that he wanted a review of the show, so that they could praise the combined efforts of the community they served to make this Halloween one to remember.

The ticket was taken by a young woman dressed in a short black dress, white and orange striped tights, a black witch hat and a prominent fake wart on her nose. She escorted Susie to a seat on the second row and two seats in from the aisle.

“Is this in the splash-zone?” Susie asked. “I heard there was a splash-zone and I don't want to get my clothes ruined.”

The witch-usherette said, “You should be alright, the official splash-zone doesn't start until another three seats in; and most of the 'splash' has been confined to the very middle of the row.”

The show began with Arthur in the guise of the generic mad scientist bemoaning his lack of somebody (he pronounced this as two words, making it 'Some body') to help with his experiments and another 'Any body' to experiment upon. His frustrated musings were cut short by the sound of a doorbell and the entrance a person in the uniform of a delivery person; Susie recognised Hannah as the delivery person. Hannah pushed on a small trolley stacked high with cardboard boxes of various sizes, got Arthur to sign on a clip-board, unstacked the boxes from the trolley in a haphazard pile, then left.

The mad scientist quickly emptied the boxes, resulting in a pile of mannequin parts for a dark skinned dummy.

It did not take long to construct a naked headless mannequin that had the same proportions as Martha, but Arthur seemed to have a problem attaching the head, which already had the tall black wig with the white streaks up the sides, but did not resemble Martha.

The mad scientist decided that the body needed some cover, partly for the safety of the assistant that he was making from the expensive components that he had ordered, but mainly to reduce the distraction factor of the obviously female model. Fitting a dress was easy; remove the arms, slip the dress over the torso and refit the arms. He also came up with a solution to attaching the head; he positioned a bolt across the neck stump and held the head in place squeezing the bolt in between then tightened the bolt.

The completed mannequin he moved into a tall clear cabinet, which, after some controls were operated, filled with smoke. About three seconds after anything more than the silhouette of the dummy was lost to view, Martha burst from the cabinet releasing the smoke, thus showing the cabinet was empty.

There followed a scene where Arthur adjusted the bolt through Martha's neck 'to be more comfortable'. This included a couple of times when her head appeared to come off and the problem being solve by driving an iron rod through the top of her head and down her neck and then re-inserting the bolt and tightening it.

The next few things were close up effects dressed up as 'mad scientist inventions'. These 'inventions' were each demonstrated to an audience volunteer and shown to the rest of the auditorium via the screens around the stage.

Again the 'door bell' was heard and Martha was sent to 'answer the door'. She returned with the 'schoolgirl' Hannah. Arthur immediately told the audience, in an aside, that Hannah would be the ideal subject for some of his experiments. I did not take long to persuade Hannah that he had a few small jobs for her to do, especially as she told the scientist that she was looking to help raise funds for her school.

The first experiment was a teleportation chamber. Two similar cabinets were brought forward and Hannah stepped into one and after a few bright flashes and showers of sparks she stepped out of the other without seeming to have passed through the space in between. Hannah being a smart girl wondered out loud what would happen if there was something where she was supposed to appear.

Arthur assured her that if re-materialisation at the destination was not possible due to an obstruction, the machine would not dematerialise her in the first place. He offered to prove it. A board was fitted at neck level in one of the teleportation booths and Hannah was loaded into the other. The seemingly inevitable result was that Hannah's head appeared on the board while her body stayed put in the original cabinet. After a confusing sequence of attempts to reattach Hannah's head, it was placed on a small table and her body guided to behind the table. Her body squatted and the her head was slid from the table onto her neck stump where it stuck back in place.

The next segment was introduced as a hypnosis stunt and involved a preselected audience volunteer.  In a demonstration of the use of hypnosis to alleviate pain and control shock, he had the volunteer strip topless, then cut two small holes in her belly through which blood flowed, dripping down the front of her pale pink skirt, until he told her to stop bleeding. He reached into the holes he had opened in her belly and pulled out lengths of her intestines; her reaction to this was similar to what had gone before, a mild level of interest that you might give if someone was showing a new way to fold a shirt. The two lengths of intestine were draped over her shoulder in such a way that her breasts were partially hidden. The guts seemed to want to slide from her shoulder so Arthur produced some skewers. The first skewer he jammed into her shoulder to keep her guts in place. The remaining skewers were soon used to demonstrate how pain-resistant she was, although the exposed innards were not pierced. The couple of skewers were used to pin her hands to her buttocks by pushing them through her wrists, the waistband of her skirt and out so they showed at the front, then the intestines were hooked onto her thumbs to prevent them from slipping forward and getting dirty from the floor. The volunteer was then returned to her husband who was charged with looking after her and making sure that she got a drink during the interval, which was then announced.

After the interval, the hypnosis volunteer returned to the stage and was put into one of the teleportation booths and soon stepped out of the other with no evidence that she had been stripped, disembowelled, and skewered.

The second half continued with close up 'mad scientist inventions' and set pieces with Hannah, Martha and volunteer magicians performing the dagger head box and jigsaw illusions in their usual form.

“And now we come to the climax of our show. We are going to saw someone in half and, unlike what we did with Martha earlier, we will be separating the halves. Do I have any volunteers?”

Whether it was the plain statement of his intent, the various gory illusions that had gone before, or the thought that this show being on Halloween proper and the last show of the run so there was likely to be an unpleasant twist, there were no volunteers. Two or three women did put up their hands, but after some words from their friends, quickly pulled them down.

“I feared as much. In shows over the last few weeks, when we have not had someone brave enough to volunteer, I have allowed the audience a choice of whether this sawing was demonstrated on Martha or Hannah, so now they have done it five times each; it would seem unfair to disrupt that evenness. Fortunately, I have someone in mind who will make an ideal subject for this experiment.”

Susie became aware of movement between her and the aisle; the couple that had been sitting in the two seats between her and the aisle were getting up. Martha stood there holding out her hand, inviting the reporter to participate. She hoped that people would not notice and she could pretend not to be there.

This option was taken away by Arthur saying, “We have Susie Sharpson, our's, and I'm sure everyone's, favourite reporter on local TV.” To further point her out a spotlight found her.

She stood to acknowledge the applause she was getting, in the hope that she could get her fans to prevent her being part of the proposed act. Martha stepped in and took her hand. With a surprisingly firm grip, the reluctant reporter was pulled towards the aisle; the alternative was to try to stay where she was and be pulled over by the pull Martha was applying to her wrist. Now that she was moving stopping was not an option until she was on stage, so she did her best to maintain a slow dignified pace, in the hope that extra time it bought her would be enough to formulate a plan for not being the victim of the act that Arthur was already preparing by bring on stage a gurney.

“Thank you for coming up and volunteering to be sawn in half, Ms Sharpson,” the magician greeted her.

“I don't think I really want to be sawn in half,” Susie stated, then she made an appeal to the audience. “You don't want want to see me sawn in half, do you?” She was disappointed by the mixed response especially as it seemed to favour seeing her as victim. “Why don't we saw the magician in half, instead?” After an brief moment of enthusiasm for the plan from the audience and the magician's assistants, then the crowd turned against her and began calling for her to be sliced in two.

She wondered what had caused the audience to change their mind so suddenly, then she saw there was something playing of the video screens. After a few moments she recognised the images as being from her report on the show earlier in the month. It had been edited to highlight her being cruel to the assistants. By the end of the minute that the video lasted, everyone, but Susie herself, wanted to see Susie sawn in two.

Being aware that being a victim in a magical illusion, of some sort, was practically a rite of passage for any female reporter, which she had managed to avoid so far, she bowed to the inevitable. “Ok, I'll go backstage and change into whatever costume you have for me, then we can get this over and done with.”

“There are three problems with that,” admitted the magician. “First, we haven't got a costume for you, because we had no idea who might volunteer and what their measurements might be. Secondly, I feel this audience deserve to know that you have not been coach for this in any way. And finally, I don't have any tricks prepared to cover for the time it would take for you to change and be instructed in how to do this, and I'm sure that these good folks don't want to be kept waiting.”

While the audience agreed with the final assertion, Hannah brought the gurney forward. “You may want to take off some of your clothes, because they might get damaged if they come in contact with the saw.” This made sense to Susie, so she removed her jacket and handed it to Martha, then pulled her blouse out from her skirt and knotted the hem so that it stayed up around the base of her ribs. “If that's as far as you're willing to go to protect your clothes, you might find it isn't quite enough, but we can provide some clothes to go home in, if it comes to that. Now we need to get you onto the gurney, so that you are ready for the saw.” Arthur stepped in front of Susie and lifted her by her bare waist high enough that when Hannah pushed the trolley forward, Susie had to lift her legs and was sitting on the padded top.

“Ok, Susie, I want you to lie down on the trolley face down and get comfortable. While you do that,  we'll turn this gurney so you will be facing the audience. I'm sure they want to see how you react to being cut in two.”

Susie lay on the trolley and was slightly more worried that she did not felt any break or dip in the padded surface. Her slight frown, as seen on the screen by the audience, turned to a full-on 'What's happening' expression when she felt Hannah and Arthur take an ankle each and enclose them in a padded strap that was connected to the corner of the trolley by a short chain. While she could move her ankles a bit, she could not bring her ankles together any more. She was glad she had taken the time to smooth her skirt down to its proper place with the hem at shin level. Her next surprise was that instead of putting a frame over her bared midriff, the magician and his assistant took her wrists and fastened them with another pair of padded straps to the edge of the trolley about level with her waist.

“Aren't you going to hypnotise me or something? So I don't scream too much or whatever.”

“No, Ms Sharpson, I expect you to die.” After a moment he added, “I'm sorry I couldn't resist. But you have been hypnotised, mainly so that you don't panic and hurt yourself as you are sawn in half. I feel sure that you want to know that you are really being cut in two and not be so out of it that you come to without having had the experience and wondering if it really happened. Besides, it's Halloween night and we magicians are expected to perform the most horrifying versions of our magics that we can.

“Allow us to introduce you to the saw that will be cutting you in two in a few minutes time.” On cue, Martha pushed a tall frame with a large motor and a belt drive to a large buzzsaw blade in the middle. To draw further attention to the fifty inch diameter saw blade, Martha tapped it with a hammer; after the initial crash, it rang for several seconds. “This is the saw blade that we will be cutting you in half with; it is a little over four feet across and has 300 teeth around the edge, which we have had sharpened every day, to prevent them from becoming dull. The blade is turned by a belt driven by this 32 horsepower electric motor, which will also move the whole frame along the guide rails to ensure a clean and even cut.” For a moment Arthur's tones sounded as if he was the announcer describing the tacky top prize on a TV game show.

“I don't think I want to do this any more,” protested Susie.

“Ok, we'll see if we can find a replacement. Does anyone want to take Susie's place starring in this dangerous stunt?”

“You're not exactly selling it,” commented Susie. “What about one of your assistants; you said that they had done it before. I'll even offer anyone volunteering to stand in for me a bonus of 200, cash, from my own pocket.” Still no-one offered to save Susie from the fate set out for her.

“It looks as if nobody is going to save you from having accepted being volunteered,” observed Arthur. “Shall we begin?”

Susie noticed that while Arthur and Martha had been introducing her to the saw on its wheeled frame, Hannah had been making some adjustments to the trolley on which she lay. There were now some framework  sticking out from the side of the trolley the extended the length of the trolley by a couple of feet forward and backwards.

The magician and his assistant wheeled the saw blade to the upstage end of the trolley and fiddled with it so that it lined up with the framework down the sides.

“Wait a minute! Aren't you going to use the saw to saw a piece of wood or something, to convince the audience that it's real?” asked Susie in a desperate attempt to eke out the time before the saw came for her.

“I think that if a sceptical soul here is not sure by now that this saw blade is solid and very real, sawing a lump of wood is not going to persuade them.” There were a couple of clicks, which drew Susie's attention to the placement of the saw.

“I thought you were going to saw me in half cross-ways,” the reporter protested as she twisted to look at the toothed circle of steel that had been parked with its edge between her ankles and inches from the padded trolley-top she was shackled to.

“As far as I remember, I made no mention of the direction that you would be sawn; that was pure assumption on your part. I know you probably just want to remove some more clothes, but we think that you might try to disappoint this audience by running away; and as I mentioned earlier, we can give you something to make you decent after the show.”

Arthur addressed the audience. “For those of you that have not read the disclaimer on the ticket or the program, This part of the show can get very messy in the auditorium. So if you don't want to be sprayed with blood and are currently sitting on a seat with a plastic cover, you have about a minute to move out of the splashzone; that's about the time it takes for the saw to achieve its working speed and then reach the body of whoever happens to be shackled to the trolley, in this instance Susie Sharpson.”

A few people in the audience moved from their seats to stand in the aisles, while Arthur pressed a button and waited for the saw blade to accelerate to as fast as it could. He and Susie noted that the number of faces in the area immediately in front of the stage had thinned.

The magician turned a lever, which caused a slight stutter in the wooshing noise from the saw blade, as the mechanism began to draw the whirling teeth towards Susie was engaged. “I'll see you on the other side. Give them a good show!” He stepped away into the darkness that cover most of the stage. The only thing highlighted was Susie trapped on her trolley with the spinning disc of the saw beginning to move forward from its initial station between her ankles.

On the screens around the stage, were images from various angles, particularly an overview shot and one that concentrated on her face.

Soon the suspense was interrupted by a buzzing noise. A high-mounted camera focused on the point where teeth of the blade were nibbling at the vinyl that sheathed the trolley's padding. Those that looked carefully could see vinyl shreds being flung upward, soon to be augmented by tiny shreds of the plastic foam within.

Susie was concentrating hard on not screaming her terror. She was wishing for a power-cut or some brief loss of lighting that would enable the magician and his assistants to whisk her away from her current danger and replace her with a dummy full of fake blood. Her concentration broke when the noise from saw blade suddenly went from combining the whisper of the teeth cutting the air and the buzz of it nibbling at the cover and padding of the trolley-top, to the shriek of it cutting the wooden base of the top adding tiny scraps of wood to the ejecta from the saw. She let out a short scream, masked by the squeal of the saw and some screams from the auditorium. This was getting much too real for her liking; she had always assumed that reporters in illusions had been given some training before hand or were used in non-dangerous illusions.

She did not get much time to consider this, because she could feel the beginnings of something tugging at her skirt. A look round confirmed that the saw was slowly ripping the rear hem of her skirt and lifting it at the same time. While she watched in fascinated horror, the teeth began to pick at the front hem of her skirt and pulling upward between her legs.

Susie was distracted by hearing Arthur's voice, and being certain that nobody else could. “Please, try to stay still and symmetrical about the blade, it will end up better for you and easier for me to put you back together.” It seemed that the magician had not intention of intervening before the whirling blade had done its work.

Her mind began to work at a million miles an hour. Was there any chance she could escape? None! Reporter training did not include getting out of handcuffs. And she would need a pick of any sort; the nearest thing she had was a hair-grip, but that was in her hair, which with hands handcuffed might as well be at the bottom of the ocean, where her hopes of surviving this situation were heading. She consoled herself that releasing her hands, even if she could, would be futile, because she would also need to release her ankles, which would mean leaning into the oncoming saw.

With this realisation she felt calmer; she was not in control of what was happening and could not do anything to gain that control. What happened happened! She had to trust that the magician knew what he was doing and that he was not using her as a sacrifice to some dark god, demon or other entity.

Her adrenaline levels were causing her mind and heart to race. She hoped that what she was about to experience would not be too painful and to pass out as soon as possible; she did not much care if it was from pain or loss of blood, just so long as it was quick. She felt that cooperating with magician by returning to lying straight on the gurney, would increase the chances of a quick end. She eyed to blade one last time, in the vain hope that it would show her how to avoid it, then resigned herself to being chewed up and spat out by it.

With the blade pulling her skirt tight against her mid-thigh, she heard Arthur say, “Good girl, stay calm and enjoy the experience you are about to have.”

Moments later, she felt teeth of the blade pull on and then rip through her panties. If her hands had not be secured to the trolley, she would have moved her hands to cover the damage. After a moment of feeling embarrassed, she felt it was probably just as well that her hands were shackled, because she did not want to think how many fingers she would have lost is her instinct had been allowed to take control. Somewhere in her head she wondered why she was glad she was not losing fingers when she was going to be sawn in half from bottom to top at any moment, and at the speed the saw was moving it was likely to be a very long moment.

The beginning of that moment arrived; Susie felt a scratch-like sensation up the inner part of her left buttock and then it went numb. Her eyes went wide with shock and surprise; a fact relayed to the audience via the screens. The audience could see a fine spray of red added to the materials being flung up by the saw.

Instead of more scratches, which her mind raced to calculate (300 teeth times the rpm of the blade, which if the magician had mentioned she had missed), she felt a numbness begin to spread. It was not the numbness of cold or restricted circulation, but the satisfied numbness that welcomes you to sleep after a busy and productive day. Her face was seen to relax for a moment, then she was seen to notice something else.

Susie noticed a high frequency ticking noise that synchronised to feeling of something trying to lift her hips. She thought about looking back to find out what was causing it. A part of her mind, perhaps the part most deeply hypnotised, suggested that she heed the magician's warning to remain lying as straight as she could to make restoring her an easier task. The rest of her mind agreed that if getting put back together was an option (and she fervently wished it) making it easier to do would increase the likelihood of it happening sooner rather than later.

She felt a relaxation of the waistband of her skirt, then a rightwards and upwards force on her hips. This was followed by a patch of fabric, that her mind identified as the remains of her skirt, shot over her head and landed on the lap of a man in the front row. She was not sure but it seemed that top part that had been the waist band was stained red. The man's blood sprayed face smiled and he tucked the scrap under the plastic rain coat he wore.

With her legs now on show, the audience were amazed to see that Susie's feet were still moving. They could also see the saw blade spinning between her buttocks that were negligibly protected by the remains of her panties. The edge of the blade had been painted a vivid red since it had made contact with Susie's body.

Through the numbness that was beginning to track up the middle of her body, Susie could track the progress of the saw. She quickly worked out that her groin would be split asunder in a few seconds and hoped that she did not get a repeat of the scratch sensation on her pubic area. Seconds later she found out that are some feelings that no matter how good she did not want to feel in public. While blood rushed to her face, she heard Arthur whisper, “A little thank you for allowing us to volunteer you.”

As she recovered what little poise she had left, she noticed that ticking and the upward pull that seemed to be associated with it had moved up her back, and coincided with the curved edge of numbness that was progressing up the small of her back. She thought it would be logical that this might be cause by the teeth of the blade getting caught in the bones of her spinal column; it suddenly made sense to her that the saw blade would need to be sharpened daily.

She tried to think around the numbness that tracked up her centre and the residual good feelings from her having the inside of her groin rubbed by fast moving steel. She wanted to work out what would happen next.

What did happen was not on that list of possibilities. The saw caught in the tucked up and knotted hem of her blouse. Instead of cutting through as it had with the skirt, it pulled Susie upward. She felt the numbness streak up her spine and she was pulled around the circumference of the whirling blade for the fraction of a second it took for the bunched fabric of her shirt to give way. Her face expressed the shock of this violent episode and the pain she felt where the back of her head touched the speeding teeth.

A few observant members of the audience spotted a small section of the saw in the gap that briefly opened between Susie's belly and the trolley's upper surface. Then Susie slumped back down onto the trolley. It was easy to see the reddened gash up to between her shoulder blades, despite the fluttering of the remains of her blouse and her bra straps.

While the audience watched the ceaseless progress of the saw, they saw that Susie's hands and feet were still moving. It also became apparent that her body was being lifted slightly above the trolley to which she and the saw were connected. The catching of the teeth in her vertebrae was raising her body. The reporter had not noticed, because she was more concerned about the imminent prospect of having a saw pass through her head and what that would do to her hair, which she already considered ruined by the dampness that had penetrate to her scalp; she could only conclude that her hair was soaked in her own blood.

When the saw reached her breast bone, the lifting effect of saw teeth catching on bone increased.

With her face lifted, she saw a microphone in front of her. A side-squint showed her it was being held by Arthur. “Any last words, Ms Sharpson?” he enquired.

Her first instinct was to crudely curse him and the horse he rode in on, but habit, from many years of appearing on live TV, where a misplaced word could get you fired, kicked in. “Happy Halloween!” was followed by a shriek that was caused by another scratch sensation on the back of her head. Teeth caught in her skull and pulled her body forward and upward. The blade cut though the front of her blouse and the inner edge of one of her bra cups, but there was little to be seen as the blouse remained mostly in place, kept there by the sleeves.

After some of the audience had echoed Susie's scream, they watched in horrified silence while the entry point of the saw chewed its way up her upper chest and the exit,which still sprayed blood, wore its way forward across the top of her head. In the last moments before the two points met at the tip of her nose, Susie promised herself that if she survived this, she would never allow herself to be put in a similar situation. Then she blacked out.

What the audience saw as the saw exited Susie's nose was the two halves of her body slump onto the surface of the trolley. The lights came up a little, showing Martha powering down the saw and Hannah disengaging the connection to the trolley. The stunned silence from the auditorium lasted long enough for the two assistants to pulled the saw away from the carnage it had caused and start to head with it into the wings.

As a first voice began to be raised, Arthur spoke. “That would normally be where most magicians would stop, except for reviving the victim. Some of you may be aware that in most illusions of this type, the two parts of the victim remain where they started. But this is Halloween night so I feel duty bound to convince each and every one of you, no matter how sceptical, that I have genuinely sawn Ms Sharpson from stem to stern.”

Hannah and Martha returned to the stage carrying a shallow metal tray. With little fuss they slid it along a set of rails in the trolley about halfway between the wrecked and bloody remains of their volunteer and the floor. They moved to opposite sides of the trolley and took hold of the rail to which the shackles were connected.

“To prove that I am as good as my word to saw a person in two, we shall pull her halves apart.”

Taking this as their cue, the two assistants pull their respective sides of the trolley along with the half of the reporter that was attached to it. Not all of Susie went left or right, with a squelching noise most of her organs fell onto the tray below.

“And that concludes our show, Ladies and gentlemen. We hope you had a good time and have a safe journey home. Those that wish to may come up on stage and see that Ms Sharpson has been completely divided, but please don't dawdle as we have a lot of cleaning up to do.”

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October 31st: later

Susie smelt something, it was familiar and pungent. It was the same smell that had been used to revive the magician's assistant that she had sawn through at the beginning of the month, but why was she smelling it now?

She tried to piece together the last month of reporting on haunted houses, corn mazes and spooky theatre productions. She kept coming back to the thought of a huge buzzsaw slicing through her from between her legs to out of the top of her head. To get these unpleasantly disturbing images out of her head, she opened her eyes.

Looming over her was a older man that looked familiar, but she could not quite place. His expression of worry, turned to relief as he cork the bottle of smelling salts.

“I'm sorry, it took longer than we thought it would to get you back, but some creep tried to steal some of your organs. But apart from that, everything went according to plan and you were marvellous. It's a pity we couldn't persuade you to remove more of your clothes, but feel free to select anything from the rack in the corner. I've left a memory stick with a recording of your participation on the dressing table and I hope we'll get the chance to work together some time soon.”