Tricky Nick

by Nicholas J. Johnson

  About Tricky Nick

  I’m Tricky Nick. The world’s greatest magician.

  This is my absolutely not-made-up story of magical greatness. Magic changed my life and it could change yours too.

  I learnt my first trick when I was ten and now I’ll teach it to you (plus a whole bunch more). You’ll also meet Trixie, a magical mystery girl, and the strange B.U.M (Brotherhood of United Magicians), and find out other Top Secret Stuff I can’t reveal just yet.

  This tale is so incredible, so unbelievable, you’ll swear I’m making it up. But you can trust me, I’m a magician . . .

  For Bea,

  who is magic.

  Contents

  About Tricky Nick

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgements

  About Nicholas J. Johnson

  Copyright

  Newsletter

  Prologue1

  Never trust anything a magician tells you. They’re liars, all of them. Big fat ones. Just watch magicians when they’re on stage. ‘There’s nothing up my sleeves!’ they’ll say. Then they’ll roll them up just to prove that it’s true. And you’ll lean in really close and you’ll swear that there’s nothing there.

  But there is.

  Even if it isn’t a deck of cards or a white dove or a string of multicoloured handkerchiefs tied together, there is always something there. Almost every magician I’ve ever met has had the same thing hidden up their sleeves.

  Arms.

  Two of them, usually.

  And those two lying arms are connected to two very dishonest hands. And those two dishonest hands are connected to ten deceitful fingers. Because those arms and hands and fingers have dedicated their entire lives to tricking people.

  While the rest of the world’s fingers are tickling, clicking impatiently and picking noses, a magician’s fingers are at work, practising. A good magician would never pick their nose. Magicians pick cards, not noses.

  Magicians are lying to you with their whole bodies, from head to toe. Sure, I’ve never actually met a magician with a deceitful bum, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one out there somewhere, lying through their backside.

  And I should know, because I am a professional magician. I’ve spent my whole life pulling rabbits out of hats, sawing people in half and insisting that everyone I meet picks a card . . . ANY CARD.

  But the story I want to tell you goes way back before all of that. This is a story from when I was a kid, not much older than you. Or not much younger. I don’t know how old you are. You could be a super smart baby who’s already learned how to read. Or one of those weird adults who reads kids’ books.

  This is a true story, by the way. I didn’t make any of it up. So when this book starts taking twists and turns that make you scratch your head and wonder how any of it is possible, I just want you to remember that there isn’t a speck of fiction in here.

  And you can trust me.

  I’m a magician.

  A prologue is the bit at the beginning of the book that everyone skips. That’s a shame because this stuff is great.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Something up my sleeves

  I found my first magic trick on the back of a box of Cornflakes. Instead of a maze or a colouring competition or a lame ad for a not-very-good movie about a talking dog, there were the instructions for The Amazing Disappearing Coin Trick.

  ‘Do you have a ten-cent coin?’ I asked Mum across the breakfast table. The instructions said you needed a small coin. Ten cents would be perfect.

  ‘I’ve already given you your pocket money,’ she said, standing up to take my empty bowl to the sink. ‘I’m not giving you more.’

  ‘It’s for a magic trick,’ I explained.

  ‘I don’t care what you’re going to buy with it,’ she said. ‘The answer is no.’

  ‘What kind of magic trick only costs ten cents?’ Dad called out from the laundry, where he was ironing his shirts. Dad liked to iron shirts. Some dads like to tinker in the garage. Some dads like making cupcakes. My dad had his ironing.

  ‘It doesn’t cost ten cents,’ I called back.

  ‘So you want more than ten cents?’ Mum exclaimed. ‘Well, now the answer is definitely no.’

  My parents gave me pocket money every week for cleaning the car and my room but I’d already spent that. It just wasn’t enough. Once I’d paid back my friend Gary for money I’d borrowed the week before and bought a few Snickers at the shops, there was hardly anything left. Mum had decided what the jobs should be and how much I’d get paid. When I asked why it wasn’t more she’d just said, ‘Because.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I’ll just use a cornflake.’

  I took a single cornflake from the box and laid it on the end of my index finger.

  ‘Check this out,’ I said as Dad emerged from the laundry to collect more coathangers.

  Then I reached over the cornflake with my other hand, clicked my fingers, and the cornflake was gone. Vanished. Disappeared.

  Mum’s eyebrows went up. Then she smiled in that smug way that only mums can and turned back to the sink. Dad gave an approving nod and went back to the laundry. It’s a parent’s job to pretend to be impressed by all the dumb stuff their kids do. It’s one of those unspoken rules. We know they’re pretending but we don’t care. So when we actually impress them, when we really blow their minds, it’s pretty special.

  And I had just impressed my mum and dad.

  Right then, I was hooked. That was the moment I knew exactly what the rest of my life was going to look like.

  Suddenly, I was the one with power.

  I was the one with the secrets.

  I was a magician.

  I can teach you the secret if you want. As long as you promise to keep it to yourself.

  Repeat after me:

  I, (you say your name here), promise to keep this secret a secret.

  Great. We’re ready to begin.

  Are you wearing a jacket? Or a shirt with long baggy sleeves? If not, go and put one on. I’ll wait. Just make sure you’ve got lots of room around your wrists.

  Okay, now get a coin, the smallest one you can find.

  Ready?

  Balance the coin on the very tip of your index finger like this.

  Now place your other hand over the coin like you’re about to snap your fingers. Your middle finger should be almost touching the edge of the coin. It should look a bit like this:

  Now snap your fingers right next to the coin. Your snapping finger should whack the coin straight up your sleeve.

  Of course, it probably won’t work the first time you try. You might drop the coin. Or forget how to click your fingers. Or the coin might miss your sleeve and it will fly across the room and up your dog’s nose. This isn’t a great idea because
your dog will end up with dozens of coins jammed up there and he won’t be able to smell other dogs’ butts properly. But keep practising, because very soon you’ll be a magician with your very own set of lying arms up your sleeves.

  And a bunch of coins as well.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Seven nine three point eight

  On the outside, my parents were two of the most boring people you could possibly imagine. Not just regular parent boring. I’m talking extra-strength boring. Fuel-injected boring. Now-with-30-per-cent-more-added-boring boring.

  Take my dad, for example.

  My dad was a geologist. That means he was a scientist who spent all day studying rocks. Not studying killer dinosaurs like a palaeontologist. Or searching for planet-destroying asteroids like an astronomer. Or swimming with poisonous jellyfish like a marine biologist.

  He looked at rocks.

  Can you get any more mind-numbingly dull than that?

  But here’s the big secret about parents. They’re only boring on the outside. They’re like a good magic trick. There are all sorts of interesting things going on under the surface that you can’t see.

  For example, the rocks Dad studied actually came from volcanoes. Before he got his hands on them, they weren’t rocks at all but molten magma, deep underground. Then, a volcano exploded and the lava oozed out of the ground. The lava cooled in the air and turned into rocks. Then Dad dug the rocks up and studied them to help figure out why the volcano blew up in the first place.

  My mother seemed boring as well. She was a librarian at a high school. You’d think that would mean she spent her days taking books off shelves, putting books back on shelves and then telling all the teenagers who were taking books on and off shelves that they were doing it too loudly and they should be quiet.

  But that’s only what you see on the surface. Because beneath the surface, librarians know all sorts of useful stuff.

  ‘Seven nine three point eight,’ my mother said.

  I was still at the breakfast table, that very first vanished cornflake still nestled up my sleeve, making its way towards my armpit. I’d just told Mum that my lifelong dream (of the past five minutes) was to be a magician.

  ‘Seven nine three point eight,’ she repeated. ‘They’re the only magic words you’ll ever need.’

  ‘That’s not magic words, it’s a number,’ I replied.

  ‘I know it’s a number,’ Mum said, ‘but it’s the most magical number in the world.’

  I wasn’t convinced. ‘Are you sure? I think “Hey presto” is much better.’

  Mum thought about it for a second and said, ‘Did you know that “presto” is Italian for “quickly”?’

  Those four little digits really are the most magical numbers in the world. But they only work in a library. Go into any library in the world and shout out any of those regular magic words.

  ‘HEY PRESTO!’ you could shout, and all that will happen is that the librarian will say: ‘SHHH!’2

  But try shouting that magic number instead.

  ‘SEVEN NINE THREE POINT EIGHT.’

  ‘SHHH!’ the librarian will probably still say. You know what? It’s best to avoid yelling in libraries altogether.

  But I promise, if you whisper that number to a librarian, they’ll take you to every single magic book in the library.

  I couldn’t believe it when my mum explained this secret librarian’s code to me.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘You’re telling me that if I go to any library in the world and say “seven eight three point nine”, they will just give me the magic books?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘If you say “seven eight three point nine”, you’ll get books on singing. You need to ask for “seven nine three point eight”. There’s a number for pretty much every subject in the world.’

  Classic librarian. Mix up a couple of numbers and they’re all over you.

  ‘If that’s true, then what is the code for hovercrafts?’ I demanded.

  ‘Six two nine point three,’ Mum replied without even thinking.

  ‘Farts?’

  ‘Six one two point four,’ she said. ‘And don’t be disgusting.’

  ‘How about volcanoes?’ Dad called out from the laundry, where I could see he had finished ironing his pants and had moved on to his undies.3

  ‘Five five one point two,’ Mum said, sighing.

  I’d been to our local library hundreds of times in my life and I had no idea these magical secrets had been sitting there the whole time.

  ‘Hey, Mum,’ I began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What time does the library open?’

  Unless the librarian is Italian, in which case they might say, ‘What do you mean, “quickly”? I’m going as fast as I can!’

  My dad irons his underpants. It’s weird, I know. But no one is perfect.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A reason to be alarmed

  My local library was like a shoebox. It was rectangular and white and smelled of feet.

  It wasn’t even a proper building. The library was just a big flimsy container that sat on a slab of concrete in an empty lot between our local supermarket and the indoor swimming pool. It had one door on the side and a handful of tiny windows up high on the walls. There were tangled bushes growing on either side of the steps leading up to the door but, apart from that, the rest of the lot was covered in thick grass and weeds.

  Mum shoved the library’s heavy glass door open. The librarian was sitting behind his little counter, stacking books.

  ‘Do you think HE knows where the fart books are?’ I asked.

  ‘NICHOLAS!’ Mum snapped at me, way too loudly for a library. ‘ENOUGH WITH THE FART TALK!’

  ‘SHHHH!’ the librarian hissed at my mother, giving her a look that suggested she probably should have known better, being a librarian herself. Mum looked mortified. Like a dentist with bad teeth or a bald barber, there are few things more embarrassing for a professional librarian than being shushed.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘My son is looking for books on magic.’

  ‘Seven nine three point eight,’ I mouthed, and the librarian nodded his little bald head, looked over his glasses at me and pointed to the far side of the library.

  My eyes fell on a small but glorious collection of magic books: more than I could possibly read in one go. I walked over and ran my finger gingerly across the spines, carefully pulling out the ones that caught my eye. Mum had disappeared. The whole world disappeared.

  There were picture books for little kids, showing them how to make their own props out of cardboard boxes and glitter and glue. There were also books that were clearly meant for real magicians. Those were filled with words and diagrams I could barely understand.

  Each book was filled with secrets just waiting to be uncovered. I felt like I shouldn’t be here, like these secrets were meant for someone else, someone more important.

  And that’s when I found it.

  A thick paperback buried between Mark Wilson’s Complete Course in Magic and The Royal Road to Card Magic. The spine was cracked and broken but I could still make out the title.

  Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic by J. Mesno.

  I turned the paperback over and over in my hands. The cover was black and the title was written in big red capital letters. In the centre, a black and white photo showed an old-fashioned-looking magician with a thin black moustache and an even thinner smile. The rest of the cover was plastered with words. MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED DETAILED ILLUSTRATIONS! NEWLY REVISED AND EXPANDED!

  I flipped open the book to what looked like the instructions for hypnotising someone.

  ‘One always finds it inspiriting to chance upon a disquisitive mind amongst this humble bibliotheca of prestidigitation.’

  I looked up from the book to see an old ma
n standing in front of me, his arms outstretched. He wore a brown tweed suit covered in tiny checks. A bright patterned handkerchief stuck out so far from his breast pocket it looked like a colourful bird trying to escape. His hair was white with specks of black, a hair colour you sometimes hear called ‘salt and pepper’, but always makes me think of a mouldy bathroom ceiling.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I said, not having understood a single word the man with the mouldy-bathroom-ceiling hair had just said.

  ‘This athenaeum of thaumaturgy?’ the old man said. ‘This chrestomathy of conjuring?’

  If you’re feeling a bit thick about now, you really shouldn’t.

  The man I was talking to was kind of up himself. He liked to use long words to make himself look smart.

  Never trust people who use unnecessarily long words. They are just a bunch of stultiloquent jobbernowls.

  What the old man was actually trying to say was: ‘It is always nice to see a young person exploring the magic section of the library.’

  ‘I’m a magician,’ I said as the man plucked the Encyclopedia of Amateur Magic from my hands and turned it over. ‘At least, I’m trying to be.’

  ‘Well then,’ the old man said. ‘You must perform for me. Do you have an effect to hand?’

  I wasn’t sure. Mum and Dad had looked kind of impressed by my vanishing cornflake over the breakfast table but I hadn’t tried entertaining a stranger. This felt like a step up. And since I’d only been practising since that morning, it felt like way too much too soon.4

  ‘I know one trick . . .’ I admitted. ‘You get a coin and then . . .’

  The man held up a finger to silence me.

  ‘Show, don’t tell,’ he said.

  I fumbled in my pocket for a coin before remembering I didn’t have one.

  ‘Do you have a coin?’

  He reached into his pocket and took out a handful of loose change. I took a coin and placed it on my index finger. My fingers were shaking as I snapped them. In an incredible stroke of luck, the coin shot up my sleeve first try. The old man, his eyes fixed on my hand, didn’t seem to notice where the coin had gone. If anything, he seemed vaguely impressed. Had I just fooled a magician?