“Of course it was real!”
They laughed, then puzzled smiles, explaining. “You were on the stage, in the center. Empty stage! Blacksmyth on the left, talking to you. You made it seem so real! The leap at the end, and the kick, it was amazing! You really believed . . . did you?”
More than believed. He knew.
Jamie Forbes lived the evening through, over and again, all the way back to his apartment.
Stone solid as any boulder, hard as any steel that ever he had touched. Belief? He would have starved to death in that room, trapped there by . . . by what? More than belief. By absolute, unquestioning conviction.
From the barest of suggestions: “Let's you and me take a little walk in our minds . . .”
What was I thinking, “I can't be hypnotized?” I fell for some smooth talk, I was convinced into prison. How can that happen?
Years later, he learned he wouldn't have died there, left alone. He would finally have slept, and waking, recovered from the prison-beliefs that seemed so real to him a few hours before.
CHAPTER FIVE
The sign in the lobby next evening was unchanged:
This last night of the show, Jamie Forbes took a seat mid-audience, row S center, a hundred feet from the stage. No volunteering this time, he thought. Tonight we watch. What did this man do to me? How did he do it?
Each act was fun, of course, but he shrugged the fun aside and watched what happened: a few quiet words and the first volunteer was lost in trance.
One glance through a shuffled deck, she could recall the sequence of fifty-two playing cards, error-free, as they were drawn from the deck.
“Your arm is as stiff and solid as an iron bar,” commanded the hypnotist to a relatively small volunteer, and no man from the audience was strong enough to bend it.
“You can clearly see the spirit of Mrs. Dora Chapman's departed husband,” he suggested to a teenage girl, “standing before you now. Can you describe Mister Chapman for us?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, unblinking. “He's tall, slender, brown eyes, black hair combed straight back, a small mustache. He smiles as though he is awfully happy. He is wearing what look like riding clothes, formal and . . . dashing, I guess you'd call it, a black bow tie . . .”
After her description his photograph flashed onscreen for the audience to see, the man in different clothes, but as she said. A sling supported his arm, sprained or broken not long before the photo was taken, but it was the man, all right. Somehow she saw him, unless the girl was cheating, already clued about the subject, which Jamie Forbes doubted.
“He loved riding, and his horse . . ., ” his widow whispered to Blacksmyth, then repeated it, a soft voice in the microphone, when he asked her to tell the audience.
So it went, as Blacksmyth delivered on his promise, astonishing powers brought forth, from people as ordinary as Jamie himself had been the evening before.
Is this audience, he wondered, all past-show volunteers, trying to understand what happened to us last week?
It was all he could do to keep from reliving his own trance, came the show's final act. There the three volunteers on stage. One stepped back as the hypnotist pressed gently on a shoulder, the second began to fall and was caught at once, the third resisted the touch. First and third excused with thanks and applause, courtesy somehow important to the showman.
Jamie strained to catch Blacksmyth's words, softly spoken to the remaining volunteer, tried to read his lips. All he caught was the word “voyage.”The hypnotist said something different to her than he had to Jamie the night before, took a few more seconds with her.
“And what is your name, ma'am?” he asked for all to hear.
“Lonnie,” she replied, a firm voice.
“That is correct!” he said. Waiting for the laughter to die, he raised his voice, continued. “Now Lonnie, have you and I ever met, have we ever seen each other before this evening?”
“No.”
“That is true,” he said. “Lonnie, if you will kindly step this way . . .”
Nothing could Jamie Forbes see that pointed an arrow: “Hypnotist,” toward the man on stage; no label for her: “Already in Trance.” Just two people walking slowly together, an everyday moment.
They moved from the edge of the stage to the center. She continued three steps farther by herself, as though unaware she was alone, turned, and began to look about her.
Jamie's hands went cold. He knew what she was seeing: walls, stone, the prison cell. But there was nothing around her. Nothing. Air. Stage. Audience. Not the sheerest curtain, no mirrors, no tricks of lighting.