The Erotic Magic Club Part 2

Part 2: Accidents will happen

I told you about the first time I visited the Erotic Magic Club, yes ?  That was on a Friday night.  My brother and I had been led up on stage to watch a six-foot blonde with a buzz-cut get tied up and then have her top half squeezed down to nothing.  We got a leg each to look after, and had been invited to bring them backstage afterwards to watch her being restored.  The girl was called Josephine, and the magician, Jim.  The MC, who owned the club, is called Stavro.

The following Monday I happened to be sent to Exeter on a job, and at lunchtime I thought I'd walk down to the club and see what it looked like in daylight, and maybe get to see Jo again.  Well, when I got there, an ambulance was parked outside, and I thought that perhaps one of the girls had been hurt, so I looked in at the open door to see what was going on.

"Doug!  What are you doing here ?" asked Jo, who was stood just inside the doorway.

"Oh, I'm just passing.  The question ought to be, why the ambulance ?"

Jo came out of the door and looked anxiously up and down the street.  "We had an accident in rehearsal.  Jim's bashed his head, hence the ambulance, and Suzy's stuck in an illusion and we can't get her out without Jim's help."

"Can I help ?"

"How much do you know about Jim's illusions ?"

"Well, I've been watching magic shows for about thirty years and I thought I'd seen it all, but I never saw anything like that Wishbone thing you did until Friday."

"Come in anyway," said Jo, "you never know, we need all the help we can get right now."

The tall Icelander turned to go back into the door and I went to follow her, but I ran straight into her as she reversed back out into the street, followed by Jim the magician on a trolley, with a paramedic and his driver in attendance.  They loaded Jim onto the ambulance and sped away.

Jo explained to me what had happened as we walked through the club.  Jim was trying to develop a new illusion to add to the show.  Suzy had been chosen as first victim for the rehearsal, and Jo was on hand to learn the subsequent restoration.  The illusion had proceeded almost to completion when one of the lighting men in the flies above the stage had dropped a lamp.  The back of Jim's head had taken the full impact and he'd been knocked out.  He collected some cuts on his shoulder and down his right arm too.

Before we arrived at the stage, we found Stavro shouting at the guilty man, waving his arms around and swearing copiously in Greek and German.  We slunk past and climbed the short staircase onto the stage.

Slipping through the curtains, the strangest sight met my eyes -- Suzy on a large table, wearing chain mail.

I've just re-read that last sentence and it really doesn't convey a very clear picture.  I'll try to describe her position in more detail.

At one end of the table were her two feet, dressed in socks made of hundreds of small linked loops of metal.  The upper edge of these socks -- perhaps four or five inches above the ankle -- were welded firmly to a pair of metal disks, dividing the leg at mid-calf.

A few inches away lay the remainder of her two legs, each clad in stockings made of the same armoured material.  Once again, a disk cut across at the bottom and top of each leg.

Her hip section was covered in the same kind of chain-mail.  Stood on the three-inch stumps of her thighs, Suzy's hips rested on their silvered disks, with a large oval cutting across her mid-section.  She wasn't wearing her shorts beneath the metal.

In similar manner, we could see an armoured section of waist three inches up and three down from her navel, a pair of mailed gloves just a couple of inches short of elbow length, and a pair of bent cylinders which had to contain the remaining two-thirds of each arm.  Every piece of Suzy's body was covered in this intricately-connected material made of tiny metal hoops, interconnected in a regular pattern, and disks of the same dull silver-grey metal bound every section.

At the far end of the table "stood" the remainder of poor Suzy.  Her arms finished just an inch or two past her shoulders, and her torso was cut off at the base of her ribcage.  Both sites were covered with the now familiar grey disks of metal, and the whole of the surface of her skin was covered in the same knitted wire material.  Peering through the mail at her face, I could see her frightened eyes darting backwards and forwards across the table in front of her, and her jaw stretched obscenely around the huge red snooker-ball in her mouth, just like the white ball in Jo's mouth the previous week.

A gleaming stainless steel frame was clamped around her neck, and behind her back two dull metal disks were clamped into the assembly, as if waiting.  A length of wire ran for a short distance across the stage and plugged into the mains in a floor-box under a small hatch.

"There she is," said Jo, "locked into that sideways guillotine thing, and we can't get her out.  Her dad's beginning to get worried."

"Her dad ?" I asked.

"Stavro Mueller is Suzy Mueller's father.  She's been living in the flat above the club since she was five, so she knows every illusion Jim's done since he started here twelve years ago.  That's why she always assists in the restores, and why she always does the try-outs for new illusions.  Is there anything you can do to help?"

"I suppose we can start by turning this thing off." I said, and walked over to the floor-box.  I reached down and pulled the plug, and as soon as I had done so, I knew it had been a mistake.  A scraping sound and a thump as the disks slid home was followed by a flash and crackle as they were welded to the adjoining mesh.  A desperate wail from Suzy fought its way past the ball-gag, and her head pitched forward from her severed neck, turned once and landed face up on her hands and arms in front of her.  The clamp slid backwards from her neck, fell to the floor with a clatter and lay there, smoking gently.

Stavro burst through the curtain and saw what had happened. "Great," he said.  "Eleven pieces weren't enough, we had to go for the full dozen. What happened ?"

"I unplugged the machine and the mechanism fired," I admitted.  "Should it be smoking like that ?"

"No idea," he said, "and I've just fired our electrician.  Suzy, are you alright ?"

Suzy's voice came from the table, impeded by the ball. "Uoh oo ghoo hing ?"

Stavro picked up his daughter's head and looked through the steel loops into her eyes.  "We'll get you out," he said, "don't you worry.  We'll think of something."

Did we think of something ?  We thought of lots of things, but none of them seemed to work.  We couldn't cut the metal, we ruined two pairs of wire-cutters and a hacksaw without marking it.  Jo suggested that there might be a flaw in the mesh somewhere where we could unpick it, so we looked all over Suzy's body -- all over -- and there weren't any gaps in the pattern which we could exploit.

I asked what form the restores usually took, and Stavro and Jo described a couple.  "That's it!" I said.  "The restores all use magic too.  There's no point wasting time using classical methods, we have to do some magic here."  I thought I could guess the sort of thing that would work.  "We need something simple.  Have you got a big sheet and some of that clay stuff you put posters up with ?"

"Don't go away." said Jo.

"Eah, ghigh." replied Suzy's head.

When Jo returned, she had a huge pink bath towel and a big lump of Blu-Tack.  We stuck Suzy's body back together, laid out full-length on the table, and draped the towel over her.  The edges of the towel hung down for a few inches all round the edges of the table.  I felt her body through the towel, running my hands up her metal-covered leg until I felt the edges of the two blades passing through her left calf.  I took my shoe off and, holding it by its toe, rapped the heel sharply down on the edges of the disks.  With a clatter, the two metal plates landed on the floor under the table.  A long grateful moan, muted by the ball-gag, came from under the other end of the towel.  We achieved similar success with each of the other plates, until we had twenty-two circular sheets of metal of assorted sizes under the table.

Lifting the towel, we saw the fully reconnected body of Suzy, still clad in her impenetrable but flexible armour.  I asked her to turn over, and she lay on her front.  We covered her up with the towel again, and I took my shoe and hit her hard on the back of the head.  The ball hit the floor with a thud.

"Jesus, Shit!" said Suzy.  She knelt up and the towel fell off her.  She lifted her mailed gloves and massaged the sides of her jaw.  "Jim's got this magnet thing in his jacket pocket.  If you run it down my spine the suit should unzip and I can get out of the damn thing."

Jo frowned.  "Jim's jacket went to hospital with him.  I saw it on the bed when they loaded him into the ambulance."

"Well I'm not staying in this suit all day.  Can we get it back?"

"Well, it sounds like Doug and me are going hospital visiting" said Jo.  She took my hand and led me off the stage.  Not the ideal venue for a first date, but there you go.

I never did get back to my customer that afternoon.

After we returned and got Suzy undressed (and she got herself dressed again) she and Stavro thanked me for sorting her out so well.  Jim, as it turned out, wasn't badly hurt.  He wasn't working in time for that Friday, so the show was cancelled, but he was rehearsing again on the following Monday, and by Friday the show was on again.

A couple of weeks later, Stavro sent me a thank-you note enclosing a couple of tickets to their bowling night, and ...

But that's another story.
 

story continues in part three - bowling night

10.04.04