Disappearing Act

by James Moloney

  The Saturday rehearsal was also the time Matt would unveil his stage name. Mattheus, Master of Mystery read the sign his mum had sewn for him, using sparkling silver material on a black background.

  Barry clapped when he saw it, and there were nods and smiles from the rest of the group – all except Mr Crank.

  ‘I’m not so sure, Matt. That name is one magicians should avoid. Yes, I know it’s a fancy version of your own name. Very clever – it makes you sound foreign and mysterious. But there was an infamous magician by that name who brought shame upon us all. If you hope to do well at the Young Houdinis, you should change it.’

  Matt shook his head. Standing before Maestro Kallinar he had felt ashamed of his name. That was wrong, he had decided. If he was going to redeem the Coperneau name he must let people know he was the great-grandson of Mattheus himself.

  Mr Crank pleaded, but when Matt resisted, he shrugged and said, ‘The competition’s about magic, not names, I suppose, so maybe it’ll be okay.’ Even so, he continued to scowl at it for the rest of the morning.

  The Young Houdinis was held in a theatre in Leichhardt. It wasn’t quite Star City, but if you stood on tiptoes and craned your neck you could just make out Sydney Harbour in the distance. On the way there, with Grandad and Hayden crammed into the back seat on either side of him, Matt felt hemmed in and unable to escape his nerves. He had visited the theatre earlier in the afternoon to make sure his props were ready, which meant he’d seen the other competitors preparing their acts as well. Some were dressed in full costume and Matt’s had seemed makeshift and cheap in comparison. Remembering this in the car, he began to sweat and wondered if it was too late to pull out.

  He didn’t say anything to his mum and dad though. Some things just had to be endured.

  Matt wasn’t too distracted to miss the mischievous grin on his grandfather’s face. There was something going on behind that soft smile, as though he was holding in a fabulous secret that threatened to burst inside him. But when his father turned into the car park, Matt forgot all about his grandfather. It was show time.

  The theatre was in chaos when they first entered, which didn’t help Matt’s nerves. Only when the Master of Ceremonies called for quiet did the audience calm down and Matt along with them.

  Matt watched the acts he was up against until it was time to go backstage. ‘Come on,’ he whispered to Hayden, who looked as though he might faint.

  ‘I don’t know about this,’ said Hayden. ‘There’s so many people. What if I stuff up?’

  ‘If you make a mess of my act, it won’t be the audience you’ll need to worry about,’ Matt said. ‘I’ll cut you in half for real.’

  Hayden grinned. ‘You would too. I’d better come through then.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have asked you to be my assistant if I didn’t think you could do it.’

  Matt was nervous about his own performance, but what he’d said seemed to settle Hayden, who squared his shoulders.

  ‘What’s your stage name?’ asked the announcer. He would call it out over the microphone once Matt had set up his props and the curtain was ready to rise.

  Matt told him. The man’s eyebrows shot upwards. ‘Are you sure?’

  Matt nodded. ‘Absolutely.’ There was no going back now.

  All was ready. The announcer did his job, speaking into the microphone: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mattheus, Master of Mystery.’

  The curtain rose and there was the polite applause that had greeted every other performer – or from most of the audience at least. Among the older spectators and the judges at the back, there was mostly confusion and whispering.

  Matt could hardly say he hadn’t been warned. Far from being downhearted, however, he set out to shock them even further. He took a bow and launched quickly into his introduction.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, lovers of magic – some of you are surprised by my name. You have heard of Mattheus Coperneau, who brought shame on magicians everywhere. But that is unfair and wrong. I am going to change that story, starting tonight, because Mattheus Coperneau was my great-grandfather and –’

  He had been going to say he was a great magician, but the gasps and cries around the theatre drowned out his voice. Instead he decided to show them and, with Hayden’s help, he got started.

  He levitated two ropes coiled on the stage until they stood upright, then made them dance and pass through one another. He took a sword borrowed from Mr Crank and cut a watermelon in two to show how sharp the blade was. Then, with the same sword, he cut off his own hand. The fingers continued to wiggle happily while the hand lay separated from his body. They were Hayden’s fingers, but no one knew it – that was all part of the trickery. Moments later the hand was back on the end of Matt’s arm.

  He had Hayden climb into a box on one side of the stage, only to climb out of a similar box on the other side. He rolled Hayden in a carpet, tapped his wand and unfurled the carpet. Where had his friend gone? The carpet was rolled up again and unrolled and Hayden reappeared.

  There were other tricks, one after the other, each as thrilling, as mystifying, as utterly impossible, as the rest. Then, with a graceful bow that took his forehead all the way to his knees, Matt announced he was done.

  There was a long moment of absolute silence – and then a storm of clapping. A raging cyclone would be a better description. ‘Wonderful, wonderful,’ cried a woman who had probably come to see her own child perform, but Matt had blown her away, and she was just one of hundreds. Every aspiring magician in the auditorium had been upstaged and their parents didn’t care. Matt looked towards his own family, who were leading the applause and grinning so widely their mouths seemed too big for their faces.

  But the most amazing response to Matt’s performance came from a man they would never have guessed was there to see it. While the applause was still shaking the walls of the theatre, a figure advanced down the centre aisle from the back row.

  ‘Magnificent,’ he called. ‘Outstanding. Give him the prize.’

  When this figure reached the gap between the front seats and the stage, Matt gasped. It was Genardi Kallinar.

  Matt wasn’t the only one to show his surprise. ‘Maestro,’ cried Mr Crank, who had come forward to congratulate his pupil. There were dozens of adult magicians in the theatre and they began to crowd around Genardi too. This man was their hero, a master of their craft. They would all have loved to be as good as he was, to be known all over the globe.

  Finally, the question was asked.

  ‘What are you doing here, Maestro? This is a competition for young magicians just starting out.’

  There was no doubting the honour they all felt, but why would one of the great masters come to watch beginners?

  ‘Magic is a great art, with a long tradition that must be encouraged,’ Genardi told them solemnly. ‘I came tonight to see how those traditions are progressing among young Australians like these.’ He waved his hand vaguely towards the contestants. ‘I planned to reveal myself at the end, when it was time to award the winners, but this young man,’ he looked up at Matt, who was still on the stage, ‘this Mattheus as he calls himself, is quite brilliant and I could not wait until the end to congratulate him.’

  There was wonder in Genardi’s bird-like eyes. A quiet smile had emerged, not like the ‘put on for show’ smile he had used while signing autographs after his own act.

  ‘Are you truly a descendant of Mattheus Coperneau?’ Genardi asked Matt. When Matt confirmed it was so, he called, ‘Come down here then. Let me meet you properly.’ He shook Matt’s hand and said, ‘Whether Mattheus was a thief or not, everyone agreed he was a skilled magician. Were those tricks you performed invented by him?’

  ‘Some of them, Maestro,’ said Matt proudly. ‘I have his notebook from long ago.’

  ‘His notebook! How did you get it?’

  Matt looked at his grandfather and then his parents. ‘That’s a long story, one I can barely believe myself. The way it happened almost makes
you believe in magic.’

  Mr Crank was hovering at his shoulder and on hearing this he grunted in disapproval. Not the Maestro, however. If anything, his eyes grew brighter.

  ‘I must know the story,’ he said.

  And so, piece by piece, Matt and his family told the tragic tale of Mattheus Coperneau to Genardi Kallimar and Mr Crank and anyone nearby who cared to listen.

  Later, when the winners were announced, Matt had won first prize, which was no real surprise when the Maestro had practically demanded as much. Photographs were taken as Matt accepted his trophy from Genardi Kallinar, who seemed in no hurry to go back to his hotel.

  ‘I would love to study that notebook,’ said the Maestro.

  If this was a way of asking the Coopers to let him borrow the notebook, it didn’t work.

  ‘We’re taking it with us on a little trip,’ said Grandad. ‘Back to where it came from.’

  Where it came from, thought Matt’s tired mind. It came from the garage at home. So why did his parents look so stunned?

  ‘But it came from Montilagus,’ said Matt’s father.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Genardi. ‘Are you truly going on such a journey?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Grandad. ‘I’m going to visit my birthplace and I want Matty to come with me.’

  9

  Surprises in Montilagus

  Grandad was adamant: he wanted to pay for Matt’s ticket as well as his own. Matt’s parents were just as against it. Grandad was a pensioner, they reminded him like a CD caught on the same track. He shouldn’t be frittering away his savings when the Coopers could easily afford their son’s airfare.

  ‘I’ve got plenty of money,’ Grandad insisted when he came round for dinner a few nights after the Young Houdinis. ‘I don’t need much to live on and that lets me spend the rest in a way that makes me happy – and taking my grandson to Montilagus for his fourteenth birthday will make me happy.’

  Matt watched as the arguments were lobbed back and forth like a ball at a tennis match, all the time thinking, There hasn’t been one word about whether I should go, just about who should pay. He hoped it would stay that way. Montilagus! He couldn’t believe it.

  Then something creepy happened that made his parents forget all about Montilagus and the cost of airfares – the Coopers’ house was broken into. The burglars didn’t take much. In fact, the police thought they must have been kids who’d seen an open window and taken a chance. They stole money from the kitchen bench and turned out all the drawers in the bedrooms, looking for more. A jewellery box went missing, but there hadn’t been anything valuable in it so Mrs Cooper didn’t care. Matt was the one who suffered the biggest loss, because afterwards he couldn’t find Mattheus’s notebook.

  ‘It must have got mixed up with the other stuff the thieves snatched out of the drawers,’ he told his father. ‘They probably dumped it in a bin somewhere.’

  The picture this made in his mind almost brought tears.

  What the burglary did do, however, was settle the argument about Montilagus. With Matt’s parents distracted by police reports and talk of bars on all the windows, Grandad simply bought the tickets. They were to leave three days after Matt’s birthday.

  ‘It’ll be summer. Best time to visit a place in the mountains,’ said Mrs Cooper as she looked up from her iPad. In a weird stroke of fortune, the thieves had missed it, even though it was in full view on the dining room table. ‘I’ve been reading up on Montilagus,’ she added. ‘It snows in the winter. Minus temperatures for weeks at a time.’

  ‘I love skiing,’ said Hayden, who’d called round to play Guitar Hero on Matt’s Xbox.

  ‘What do you mean? You’ve never been skiing,’ said Matt.

  ‘Yeah, but I’d love it if I did. You’re sure you don’t want me to come with you?’ Hayden had been on at Matt about this ever since the Young Houdinis. ‘What if you want to put on a show? You’ll need an assistant.’

  ‘That’s not likely,’ said Mrs Cooper. ‘Magic’s banned in Montilagus. It says so here on Wikipedia.’

  ‘I could still go skiing,’ Hayden said.

  ‘Hayden, we’re going in summer!’ Matt said.

  ‘I could help with your bags.’

  The banter went on, even though Hayden knew very well he wasn’t going to Montilagus. The closest he got was driving to the airport to see Matt off when the day finally arrived.

  The flight took them via Singapore to Frankfurt, where they boarded a train faster than any Matt had imagined.

  ‘Like a plane flying on rails,’ he told Hayden on Skype once they’d arrived. ‘But for the last part we transferred to a smaller train. Just a few carriages, no super speed this time.’

  It had been a fantastic ride, between high mountains and through valleys so green they must have invented the colour for the rest of the world to copy, although Matt didn’t use those words when he described the scene to Hayden.

  ‘Lucky dog,’ said Hayden.

  ‘That’s not all,’ Matt went on quickly. ‘You won’t believe who was on the train with us. I went for a walk along the corridor to get the best view of the mountains and saw the Maestro, Genardi Kallinar himself, in a compartment!’

  ‘What was he doing on the train?’ Hayden asked.

  ‘Going to Montilagus, of course. He’s visiting some cousins who live there. Said he’d look out for me in the streets.’

  There is only one city in Montilagus and that is where the royal family built their Palace. Or maybe the town was built around the Palace, because it was certainly the grandest building on show. On his way back from seeing Genardi Kallinar, Matt had watched through the window as the train rounded one final mountain and there was the Palace in the distance, with towers and turrets like something out of Disneyland. The rest of the town seemed to huddle around it, the orange roofs of the oldest houses closest to the massive walls and the spire of a cathedral poking up nearby. Sighting the Palace brought a strange sensation to Matt’s stomach. That was where Mattheus had performed the magic trick that had ruined his life. And here he was, growing closer with every turn of the train’s wheels.

  The station was in the centre of town. From there, they walked along narrow lanes where no cars were allowed to drive. The whole place seemed too tidy to be real. The only blemish was some graffiti daubed on a few walls, spelling out the name Olivar.

  That’s an odd sort of tag, thought Matt.

  On one wall, someone had painted through Olivar with a thick black line and scrawled the words Li Populus above it.

  ‘That means “the people”, I think,’ said Grandad, who had been learning a bit of Montilagan. He had learned a lot about the place too. ‘The streets here are hundreds of years old,’ he told Matt. ‘That’s why they’re paved with cobblestones instead of bitumen.’

  Cobblestones might be old and quaint, but Matt was soon swearing at them in his head as he tried to wheel his suitcase across them. Luckily, they weren’t going far. Since they were planning to stay in Montilagus for a week, Grandad had booked them into a bed and breakfast. This wasn’t a hotel, but one of the old houses jammed in between all the others with no yard, just a front door opening straight onto the street.

  Grandad rang the bell and almost immediately it was opened by a woman with frizzy grey hair that surrounded her head like a garden creeper gone mad.

  ‘Welcome, welcome,’ she cried, a bit too loudly. ‘I am Frau Grossen. You are the Coppers, yes?’

  ‘Er … Coopers,’ said Grandad.

  ‘Oh, forgive me. I speak English good, but sometimes I get wrong the way to say words. Please come in.’ She stood back to let them pass, but when she saw Matt she said, ‘Oh, I thought you would be a husband and wife.’

  ‘No, I’m a widower. This is my grandson, Matthew,’ said Grandad.

  ‘Widower,’ repeated Frau Grossen. ‘I am a widow,’ she told him, and from that moment she looked at Grandad in a different way.

  The house was like Doctor Who’s TARDIS – bigg
er inside than it looked from the outside. Frau Grossen’s room was downstairs, along with the kitchen, where she would make their breakfast each morning, and a parlour with a television in the corner. The guest rooms were upstairs and since the guests weren’t a married couple, as Frau Grossen had assumed, she gave them a room each.

  The sun was already low by the time they’d settled in. After something to eat in a restaurant at the end of the street, they returned to find Frau Grossen in front of her television.

  ‘Please, sit. Tell me about Australia. Kangaroos, yes?’ she said with a smile. At the same time she crooked her arms in front of her and made her hands into paws. Matt was afraid she would try a little hop and he’d start laughing.

  ‘Yes, we have kangaroos,’ Grandad said.

  While Matt slumped in the corner of the sofa, wishing he could go out to explore the streets on his own, Frau Grossen did her best to charm Grandad. She had muted the television but not turned it off, and so Matt’s eyes were drawn to the screen, which showed a news program. Something dramatic was happening.

  Grandad noticed too, or maybe he was looking for a way to distract Frau Grossen. He asked her about the pictures.

  Frau Grossen pressed a button on the remote contol and instantly the room filled with a foreign language. Must be Montilagan, thought Matt, the language of Mattheus Coperneau, and he sat forward, suddenly interested.

  On screen, a well-dressed man was looking very serious as he spoke to reporters. The pictures changed to show the same man with his wife and children – a son who looked like a university student and a daughter about Matt’s age – all waving from a balcony and not looking half so serious. Probably film from sometime earlier, Matt decided.