Content warning: this story is based on the fantasy that stage magicians with real powers are - without most of the audience realising - actually sawing, slicing or transforming their assistants and volunteers for real, but with the aid of magic that prevents them suffering any lasting harm and which transforms their experience into one they can even enjoy. And of course they’re all restored at the end (eventually, anyway!)


Mistress Finella smiled at the woman who had just approached her. She wore a long, narrow-waisted, high-necked, Victorian-style dress. It had originally been a pale brown colour, she reckoned, but had been lightly dusted white, to match the white makeup coating the wearer’s hands, and face, those being the only parts of her visible. Her hair, too, had been dusted white.

“I guess you’re a ghost?” Finella asked.

“A phantom,” the woman responded. “Phoebe the Phantom.”

Finella’s smile turned into a wide grin. She did love daft wordplay, so just by her choice of moniker this woman had already endeared herself to the magician. “Neat costume,” she said. “I love how you’ve chosen an appropriate dress. 1880’s? And done your hair that way too.”

“Yes,” Phoebe said, seeming pleased to have her efforts appreciated. “The hair took ages, too!”

Finella leaned closer. This was the moment of truth. “So if you value an authentic look,” she began, “what would you say to letting me make you a bit more... spectral. Just for the evening, of course.”

Phoebe looked hesitant. Finella guessed that Phoebe’d seen what had happened to Dawn and was concerned about similarly going up in smoke.

“Well...” The woman hesitated.

“No fire. I promise,” Finella said. She pressed the woman a bit more. “Do you trust me?”

Phoebe paused again, then her frown lifted. “I guess so. I mean, well, I work in Accounts and you always pay your bills on time for the props you buy from us, so yeah, I trust you.”

A strange logic, Finella thought. Trusting someone with money wasn’t the same as trusting them with your life. Then again, if you worked in Accounts maybe it was.

“Great!” Finella exclaimed, sealing the deal. “That’s sorted then.” She gestured to the two vertical poles to which Dawn had recently been shackled. “Just go stand behind those, say a foot or so back, and wait while I get ready.”

“OK!” Phoebe smiled and did as she’d been bidden, adopting a pose with her feet close together, head high, and her hands modestly clasped over her stomach.

Finella knelt and opened a long cardboard box, taking out what looked like a roll of clear plastic. She carried it to the left-hand pole then tipped it up onto one end. Next she found the edge of the rolled sheet and unwound it a few inches, clipping it to the vertical pole. Finally, she unrolled it across the gap between the two poles, clipping the other end to the right-hand pole.

By now, a small crowd had formed as other invitees to the firm’s Halloween party gathered to see what was going to happen to their colleague. Finella stepped back to check her handiwork from their viewpoint.

What met their eyes was a large plastic sheet held taut between the two poles, transparent except for the edges where various icons - similar to those a computer graphics program might have - had been drawn on the surface, arranged as in toolbars. Phoebe was clearly visible through the central portion, quite unobscured from her head to her toes, as she stood patiently waiting.

Mistress Finella turned back to her audience. “Like many people,” she began, “I’ve long suspected that the majority of ghost sighting photographs have been faked, at first by manual methods like superimposing two images, and more recently by digital methods.” She paused. “Phoebe here is going to help me demonstrate how it’s done, though as I don’t own a high end PC and photo manipulation software I’ve had to improvise.”

The joke raised a few brief laughs. Finella waited for them to die away before continuing. “The first thing is to make Phoebe here appear to float in mid-air. The easiest way to do that is simply to do this.” Finella tapped the sheet where an eraser icon had been painted on. There was a flash and a real, though considerably oversize, eraser appeared in her hand.

Without further ado she knelt and swiped the eraser across the sheet from left to right, near to the bottom. As the shadow of the eraser passed over the buttoned Victorian boots projecting from the bottom of Phoebe’s long skirt and passed on, it left - well - nothing! The woman’s feet had completely vanished.

“How does that feel?” Mistress Finella asked her volunteer.

“Um, well, my feet feel kinda numb. What did you do?”

“Oh, nothing much. Why don’t you look for yourself if you’re curious?”

Everyone watched Phoebe’s skirt rise up on one side, as if she was lifting one leg in front of her, though there was still no foot visible below the hemline. A ripple of laughter followed Phoebe’s gasp of astonishment.

“What’ve you done to my feet?” the woman squealed. “And my boots? I really liked those boots!”

“Oh, I’ve just temporarily erased them,” Finella replied. “So that you can bob in the air with no visible means of support. Just like a real phantom.” As she said that, Phoebe floated upwards several inches, and began to gently float up and down. “I hope you don’t suffer from motion sickness?” Finella added with a wry grin.

Phoebe did seem to go a little paler, if that was possible, but manfully withheld from protesting.

“The next thing is to make our wannabe phantom a little less opaque.” Mistress Finella tapped and slowly dragged on a fake slider marked ‘transparency’. As she diddd so Phoebe seemed to become, by degrees, more and see-through, the patterned wallpaper on the wall behind her becoming slowly more visible through her.

Once Phoebe had reached the transparency of smoke, Finella let go of the fake control button.

“How’s that, Phoebe?” she asked.

“I feel kinda light-headed,” the accounts payable clerk replied. “Unless it’s the drink...”

“No I don’t think it’s the drink,” Finella replied. She stepped round behind the screen and slowly pushed her arm through Phoebe’s head from back to front. Her fingers waggled where they poked through the woman’s forehead, right above her eyes, the smoke-like flesh (or flesh-like smoke) swirling around the magician’s digits as they created eddies.

Phoebe shuddered. Finella messed with her for a moment longer, then came back round to the front of the screen. Then she addressed her audience once more.

“Finally, we need to fuzz out her edges a bit.” She touched another fake button and the edges of Phoebe’s already-insubstantial form became hazy, to the point where it was difficult to tell where she stopped and the air around her began. In places it was a simple fading out, but in other places her outline became a mass of tendrils that splayed out before fading away, like wisps of smoke or ribbons of plasma. Finella went behind the screen one final time and showed how the tendrils could be made to coil around her finger before blowing into one and creating a smoke ring of ecto-Phoebe-plasm which drifted off until it dissipated against the wall.

“Oi!” Phoebe exclaimed, but her voice was faint, like a dying echo. Her arm moved as if to slap Finella’s hand away, but her phantom fingers simply melted away on touching the back of the magician’s hand, only reforming when she pulled them away again.

Finella stepped back round to the front of the screen and bowed. She gestured for Phoebe to come round too, and the pair of them took in the small audience’s applause.

“Thank you all for watching!” Finella said. “Phoebe will be floating around for the rest of the evening should any of you feel like convincing yourselves she’s every bit as insubstantial as she looks. Feel free to poke and prod away.”

Phoebe looked daggers at her for that, but Finella ignored her. “Just don’t get any ideas about blowing her around with fans or sucking her into a vacuum cleaner!”

And on that note, Finella shoo-ed the audience and the transformed Phoebe away. It was time to prepare for her next trick. Not that the audience needed any further prompting, several of them heading for the corridors in an obvious hunt for the aforementioned items with which to torment their spectral colleague!


THE END

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