She nodded, pitiful, exhausted.
“Here's the answer,” came his voice, filled with drama. “Lonnie, walk through the wall!”
She did nothing. Already she was pushing against the stone, leaning in an odd posture that seemed impossible to hold, pushing against empty air.
How could she walk through, how could her body go where her hands could not?
“Lonnie, I'm going to tell you the truth. I'm not kidding. The wall is in your mind. You can walk through it if only you believe you can.”
How many times had Blacksmyth said those words? What does it do to your heart, telling the truth to someone incapable of believing it?
“I'll give it all away for you, Lonnie, right now.” He turned and spoke this drama to the audience. “You've been hypnotized. There are no walls around you. You are standing on a stage in the Lafayette Hotel in Long Beach, California, and you are the only person in this hall who believes that you're locked in that prison.”
“Please don't hurt me,” she said.
“I will not hurt you, I promise. I will help you help yourself,” he said. “We need never be prisoner of our own beliefs. We can remember who we are. At the count of Three I shall walk through the wall at one side of the room, I shall take your hand in mine and we shall walk together through the other side. And you will be free.”
Lonnie coughed a short hopeless laugh. Just let me out.
“One,” said Blacksmyth. “Two.”
“Three.”
The hypnotist did what anyone in the audience could have done. He took four steps and stood beside her.
Lonnie gasped and screamed at the sight of him, freezing blood to ice.
Blacksmyth offered his hand, but she threw her arms around him, clinging to her rescuer.
“Together now,” he said. He took her wrist. “We'll walk together through . . .”
“NO!” she screamed. “NO! NO!”
“We'll use the door,” he said, calm and even.
This had happened before, Jamie knew it at once. Lonnie had gone far enough over the edge that the hypnotist moved to Plan B: Suggest the Door.
What was Plan C, he wondered. That would be a snap of the fingers, wake her now into the world of the stage, the audience; she had volunteered . . .
She shook free, desperate relief, grabbed the invisible handle to an invisible door, ran a few steps and halted, breathing hard, turning to the hypnotist. He reached for her hand and this time she took it. He raised his other hand by his cheek, smiling into her eyes, and snapped his fingers.
It was as though he had slapped her face. She jolted back, eyes wide.
Next second came a shock-wave of applause, shattering unbearable tension in the hall, some folks standing already, transfixed by what had happened before their eyes.
Blacksmyth bowed, and as he was holding her hand, she bowed also, bewildered.
The roar filled the hall, astonished wonder.
In the midst of it, Lonnie brushed her tears, and even from row S, Jamie Forbes read her distress: What did you do to me?
Blacksmyth answered a few words only she could hear, turned, and mouthed thank-you to the applause, his expression: Don't underestimate the force of your own belief!
Jamie Forbes was lost in the strange demonstration for days after, turned it this way and that in his mind till it washed away without answer, fading before his lifelong obsession with flying.
He buried that mystery till a long time later, till well after first light of a day in North Platte, Nebraska.
CHAPTER SIX