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Darke’s Last Show

by Jonathan Louis Duckworth

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I’m still smiling when the rideshare car pulls up. Silver Honda Accord. Driver: Raul. 4.9 star rating, meaning some monster gave him a petty 4-star review once—there is no circle of Hell low enough. Raul’s a handsome kid, maybe twenty, lots of hair product, a fade shaved onto the back of his head, a winning smile, and soft-spoken. I take a quick shine to him.

Traffic’s light for a Thursday night in South Beach. It should take half an hour to get to where my friends will be expecting me, not that I’m in a rush. The car’s body trembles from the bass of an impressive sound system; I feel each pleasant pulse in the roots of my molars.

“You mind turning it up, kid? I like this one.”

Raul’s surprised. “For real? No offense, but you seem a little old to be bumping Shorty BoomBoom.”

If only he knew how old. “I try to keep up with things.”

The next song on the kid’s playlist is a classic. Biggie’s Kick in the Door with the Screaming Jay Hawkins sax sample. It was Biggie who first made me into a hiphop fan back in the 90s. Maybe I saw some of myself in him, he who had many enemies and once wore a crown.

“Quit my job today,” I say, unprompted. “More like got fired, actually.”

He sounds legitimately sympathetic. “Damn. Sorry, bro.”

In my hands is the final check, $500 made out, as always, to cash. In the corner is Mr. Wentz’s narrow, peaked signature. How long it will take for his club to start smelling ripe? In Miami? Three days, tops.

“No, it’s a good thing. Shit job. I was depressed for a long time, a stranger to myself, Raul, but now I’m feeling better.”

He keeps sneaking glances at me through the rearview. Finally, he asks. “Hey, bossman, you look familiar. Were you on TV or something?”

“Did you ever see the Netflix Special, Occult Mastery with Devin Darke?”

“Oh shit! No yeah—you’re the magic guy.”

“Yeah. I’m the magic guy. Used to be a lot more of us.”

“A lot more of who?”

“Magic guys, like you say.”

Like every old man, I start talking, and maybe it’s because I’m a little drunk, or maybe because I’m past the point of holding back for the sake of The Farce. At first I can’t tell—and don’t care either way—if Raul grasps what I’m saying, or if he’s even listening. Maybe he’s just polite, humoring me, dismissing me as just another one of the loquacious weirdos his job throws his way.

---

Look, it started with Jesus. Don’t get me wrong, Yeshua was a good guy. Big heart, and talent out the ass; one of the best warlocks to ever call on the Old Science. But he fucked up. He made the mistake of trying to help people, and you know how that ended for him. He also called attention to our kind, and that’s when The Hunt started. A thousand years of slaughter, right up through the Middle Ages, witches and warlocks wasted like passenger pigeons. And maybe it’s because we’re scary, because of everything we can do. But regular people are scary too. How many species will have gone extinct while we’re talking? How many nukes are just sitting in silos in the Dakotas waiting to be launched?

There weren’t even any of us left—not really—by the time Salem rolled around. Sure, some pretenders came up in the 1800s, guys like that lot in Germany who knew a few tricks, but that’s amateur crap, open-mic-night sorcery by store-brand warlocks. And anyway, they’re all gone. Now it’s just me, and maybe a few others hidden so well not even I can find them.

I’m rambling. All that doesn’t matter. Here’s what matters: I’m done hiding. Starting tonight, the Old Science of the Dark returns. Let Angels weep and all that.

What? No, I’m not going to do another special. That production was hell. I got maybe two hours of sleep a night for six straight months working on that show. Bad as this last gig was, at least I only had to work a few hours a month at the O-Club.

Yeah, that’s the one—the one on Collins.

No, it’s not a skinbar, not exactly, more like burlesque.

Well, sure there’s ‘titties,’ but that’s not really the point.

Okay, fine, it’s a skinbar, you happy? Anyway, I put on a show every Thursday night, an hour of magic, something to give the girls a break between shifts—and look, they deserve it, they work a lot harder than I ever have. Anyway, it was good money for a while, but Wentz—that’s the club owner, or, I should say the guy who kept the papers for the Russians who really owned it—he was a trip and a half. Greasy little guy in a white suit with his tacky combover and a scrunched-up, pug-looking face.

I got there tonight thirty minutes late. I won’t bullshit you, that was on me. I was drunk, and yeah it was noticeable. And no, it wasn’t the first time this had happened. I just stumbled in through the back entrance and Wentz was there, purple as a plum, eyes all wide and bloodshot and twitchy from whatever he’d been snorting.

“You’re done,” he said. “Do your little show and then see me backstage for your last check.”

I didn’t say anything. Just stared. He was firing me? This little garden gnome was firing Devin Darke? It hit me right then just how far I’ve fallen. Pretend to be a thing long enough and you’ll watch yourself become that thing. What was I? A bum; a putz; a cockroach for Wentz to crush and scrape off the soles of his wingtips.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” he asked. “Listen, the crowd’s getting bored.”

And they were. Beyond the curtains I could hear the grumbling and the booing while the DJ kept saying my name as if I’d just pop out on his command.

Call it an epiphany, but as I stared at Wentz’s angry pug face, I got to thinking about what I used to be, and what I’ve been reduced to. I used to have a palace. Shit, I had a cult that built shrines in my honor from Carthage to Samarkand. And now there I was, living in a studio apartment in Brickell right next to the Metromover tracks while working at some hole in the wall breathing body glitter and performing birthday party tricks for checks.

I just started laughing at the absurdity of it all, which of course only stoked Wentz’s anger.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ll give those people a show they’ll never forget.”

So I dressed up in my duds, the cape and hat and everything, because I’m oldschool like that, then I wobbled out through the curtains.

“Let’s hear it for my boy Devin Darke!” the DJ said a last time as I walked out into the light of the stage.

The applause was tepid at best. But what could I expect? What sort of people are you going to find at the O-Club on a Thursday night? Winners, that’s who. Winners just like me, every last one of them. I hadn’t even introduced myself when the heckling started.

“We came for tits, not for some Tim Burton-looking magic bitch,” this one guy yelled. He was this tall, Body-by-HGH guy. $500 jacket, $20 pants, tigers, snakes, and empty proverbs in languages he can’t read tattooed onto his biceps; you know the type.

“You, sir,” I said, beckoning to him with my finger. “Why don’t you come up and help me with my first trick?”

Simple suggestion is barely even an exertion of power. I can do it like wrinkling my nose, and the targets go along like it’s their own idea. This guy strutted up to the stage all grins and hurhurhur laughter because he thought he’d have an even better vantage to heckle me from: to my face.

His guys were cheering him on. Finance Bros by the looks of them. Like I said, winners.

“Pick a card, sir,” I said, unfurling a fan of cards from my sleeve.

He laughed ugly, got all wheezy. “You serious? Card tricks? What is this, my sobrino’s birthday party?”

The crowd laughed, his friends loudest of all, but I laughed too. I was a little rusty at maniacal laughter, and the walls of the O-Club didn’t have quite the acoustics of marble temple walls, but I shut them up with five awkward seconds of riotous cackling. A warlock always needs a malevolent cackle; or a sinister guffaw, as the case may be.

“Once more I ask you to pick a card,” I said.

He picked his card.

“Let the audience see it, but don’t show it to me. Now put it back in the deck.”

He slid the card back at the deck while cutting eyes at his pals—This guy, right?

I shuffled them, taking care to drop at least one card, which brought some giggles from the crowd.

“Is this your card?”

“No,” he said. And the audience laughed because they’d seen the card—the Ace of Clubs—and this wasn’t it. Two more tries were just as fruitless.

“Bro, you ever done this before?” he asked.

“Where could that card have gone?” I said, with bombastic, exaggerated aplomb. And while I was hamming it up and Finance Bro was laughing, no one noticed the squirming puddle of darkness that had gathered in the far back corner of the club, a living gloom insoluble to the neon lights—no one heard my whisper to it, nor heard its whisper to me, the bargain we struck.

Finance Bro’s laughter got more obnoxious, and the guy doubled over from it, holding his chest, grasping his ribs. And then the convulsions started. A rasp tore from his throat like he’d swallowed a chicken bone, and then he spat out a playing card, bent and damp and touched in one corner with a fleck of red. But it wasn’t the right card.

“What’s ha—?” he choked out. I’m sure he was trying to ask, “What’s happening to me?” but he didn’t get much out before he hacked up another card, this one spattered with more than a little blood. Another came, and then another, the guy fell to his knees. First in spurts of a few at a time, and then in a torrent, cards flew from his mouth, crumpled and messy and red.

I knelt beside him to search the deepening slushpile for the Ace of Clubs. I gave a running commentary as I sifted through. “Nope, nope, nope, not it—hey, what’s a baseball card doing here?”

Some in the audience were shouting for someone to call an ambulance, while the few who had their phones out weren’t calling anyone, but instead recording videos of the scene—you know, the usual thing. Off to the side a pair of the club’s girls were watching, and though Marbella looked sick, the other—Sandy, I think her name is—looked ecstatic with schadenfreude. Maybe she knew the guy.

And then there was Wentz, who had his phone out but was too shellshocked to dial an emergency number. And maybe he wouldn’t have wanted cops there anyway.

“Ahh, found it!” I said, at last holding up an Ace of Clubs so richly dyed in arterial crimson that you could barely tell its suit. “Here, sir, is your card,” I said, waving the Ace of Clubs over the sightless eyes of the man who’d fallen into a heap of himself, sprawled over a slurry of bloody, crimped cards.

One beat. Two beats. I dropped the card, turned my face to the audience so they could see my mask of shock, and then thumped my heel on the stage. A trapdoor yawned open to swallow the corpse and the cards. A few in the audience were still recording on their phones, probably because the mediation of their screens was the only barrier between their minds and the impossible. The rest stared fisheyed and openmouthed. Backstage the girls looked much the same. But Wentz? Wentz’s expression was funny, a question scrunched into his forehead, like he was trying to recall if the stage had ever had a trapdoor.

“Wow, what a volunteer,” I said. “Let’s hear it for him.” And just as I spoke the words the club’s back door flew open and in strutted Mr. Sun’s-Out-Guns-Out, looking none the worse for having disgorged a deck of cards from his bowels. His shirt was clean—not even a drop of blood.

One beat. Two beats. Then the applause. Drunken cheers and hoots, loudest of all from the guy’s Finance Bro buddies. As the applause died down, off to the side Wentz stepped away from the brink of an aneurysm and slid his phone back into his pocket. I saw the Finance Bros asking their pal how it works, and he just shook his head and grinned, heckler turned to coy accomplice of illusion’s tremendous power to astound.

For the next few acts, I went vanilla. Real birthday party fare. Coin tricks, flowers up the sleeve, pablum to ease the crowd. It worked, and by the time I said I wanted to make some shadowpuppets the audience was starting to look bored and listless again, the latent spell of my first illusion fading.

“Now, I’m not the best at these,” I said as preface, and held my hands in front of the stage light, the obnoxiously bright spotlight used whenever Larisha did her chorus line routine in the silver sequin leotard.

I made birds. A sailboat. A wolf’s head.

“Next act,” someone shouted from the audience.

“Next,” another said, and soon the rest of the audience took up the chant.

They wanted the real stuff; the sublime; the terror of the illusion so solid it casts your life in uncertain, fictive aspersions. So, anyway, I made a bat.

The bat flapped and fluttered. The bat divided to two bats, and while the first bat stayed where my hands moved, the other broke away, gliding over the curtains and across the stage, a little shadowy film, and broke into more bats. Soon bats were gliding everywhere, shadows moving freely, untethered. My hands had stopped moving and now lay slack at my sides. Shadow bats slipped over pantlegs, on the ceiling, on the floor, across eyes. For one second, everyone covered their ears as the club exploded with a hurricane of flapping wings and squeaking, shrieking bats.

And then it was quiet, and the shadows were gone. Another storm of applause. This time I took a bow, but only a short one. I’d save the big bow for the big finish, for the ovation. Through my peripherals I caught Wentz at war with himself. I could see the calculations in his eyes, what he was thinking—maybe I should keep him on; if Darke can do this every night, maybe I won’t even need girls to bring the crowds.

When the applause tapered, I announced my next trick, and asked for two volunteers to join me on stage, preferably a couple. As luck would have it, I found one.

Yeah, a man and a woman, is that so strange?

Well, yeah, I know it’s a stripclub. But, you know, sometimes a couple wants to try something new, something to spice up the old Insert-Rod-into-Slot-B routine.

They were in their late thirties. Both blond and blue eyed. Nice clothes. We’ll call them Mr. and Mrs. X. Not sure where it came from, but I got a very specific vibe from those two, a They-Once-Doused-a-Bum-in-Gasoline-Set-Him-on Fire-and-Fucked-While-He-Burned vibe, but underneath that was a They’re-the-Only-Ones-Who-Don’t-Know-They’re-Already-Dead vibe. Two walking corpses locked in a loveless, childless purgatory of cohabitation and occasional bodily collision. But what do I know? It’s not like I can peer into their souls and see their miasmic inner corruption or anything.

Anyway, they were so excited when I told them I wanted to saw them up. Wentz was stumped again when I brought out the equipment from the other side of the stage: a saw and two people-sized boxes on carts. He knew he didn’t have anything like that back there.

The trick went off perfectly. I assured the audience that everything was perfectly fine as they all heard the wet resistance of flesh against the steel sawblade and the dry rasp of bone and gristle giving under the saw’s persistent chew. They were screaming, too. You’d think I was killing them the way Mr. and Mrs. X shrieked, crying for help until their heads were free of their necks.

I made a slapstick show of chasing after Mr. X’s head while it rolled around, painting sanguineous ellipticals onto the stage while someone—I think one of the Finance Bros—yelled about how it was the most obvious rubber prop he’d ever seen.

I’ll admit it, that hurt me. I didn’t think it looked rubber at all.

When I opened the panels to the boxes the audience saw all the parts, the unspooled intestine, the grinning ribs, the blushing organs. Groans, gasps, a few laughs. I unfurled my cape, much more voluminous than it looked, and covered the carnage. When I lifted the shroud, Mr. and Mrs. X lay side by side, smiling and holding hands, looking at each other like the old spark was back. And who says there aren’t miracles these days?

The applause was disappointing. The noise was loud, but the air was stale, none of the tense, ecstatic crackle of the earlier ovations. Like they’d been expecting every beat. It happens sometimes, with the more well-traveled tricks.

The last polite claps were tapering off when the club doors opened and a cop—off-duty but still in uniform—shuffled in. I don’t much care for cops. Their uniforms might change over the centuries, but they’re always the same crooked, cruel bastards who used to hack off kids’ hands in marketplaces.

My eyes found his across the distance of the club, and he came my way, toward the stage.

“Officer, welcome to the show.” I said. “You’re just in time for my grand finale.”

A few minutes later the cop was with me on the stage, watching with everyone else as I rolled out a dolly bearing a glass case of water big enough for a man to drown in. I explained how it worked, not that it needed any explanation. This was another old one, Houdini pioneered it, after all. And yet escapology never gets old, because it’s so elemental. It’s not man vs water or man vs shackles or even man vs his own bursting lungs. It’s man vs time. The water represents time, finality, our struggle against the inevitable. And that’s the power of the escape, the greatest illusion of all: that there is a way out. Eventually time always wins, whether you’re inside or outside the glass.

I told the cop I was trusting him to hold the hammer that would shatter the glass and free me if I failed at picking the locks. I had the cop use his own handcuffs to cuff my hands behind my back, and then he helped me immerse myself in the water, secured the top of the tank, and set a timer. He stood by the tank, tired but smiling, a hammer in one hand and a timer in the other.

Everyone in the audience watched me as the clock ticked down. And I did nothing. I didn’t thrash, didn’t contort myself out of the cuffs or reveal a pick in my hair to jimmy the lock. I just waited. I crossed my legs into the lotus position and waited. Did they notice the lack of bubbles? When, I wonder, did they first realize the water was draining from the tank? As the water ebbed lower and lower in the tank, the cop began to tremble. He didn’t make a sound; he couldn’t make any sound more than a helpless gurgle.

People in the audience were shouting, having a meltdown.

I winked one eye open to see what they were screaming about, and it appeared that the cop was swelling. Not just his gut, his everything. His fingers were like sausages, his face was stretched to obscene and gruesome proportions, his eyes bulged from their sockets. The hammer and timer dropped from his now useless, ballooned hands. His belt snapped, his shirt and pants tore at the seams.

The water was almost all drained from the tank, and I waited in my lotus pose. When I opened my eyes, the cop burst. Not, as you might expect, in a shower of red gore chunky with gray offal and bits of white bone. Rather, as a wave of water. Just ordinary water. It washed over the stage, splattered over the rim, splashed the people sitting at the tables up front.

And they cheered. They cheered like they were at the Seaquarium getting blessed by an orca’s spray of brine.

I stood up in the tank, the cuffs sliding off my wrists, and pushed open the front panel of the glass case. I stood before them and twirled under the stage lights so they could all see my clothes were dry. I waved my hand, and for a blink, every light in the club died. Not just the stage lights or the blacklights on the ceiling, I mean everything—cell phone screens, emergency exit signs, everything.

When the lights returned, the glass case and its assembly were gone, and in its place stood the cop, looking bewildered but in perfect health.

I took the bow that cues a standing ovation.

The people were still clapping when I walked backstage, wended the corner, and found Wentz waiting for me in his office. His lips were pinched and white as he slouched over his desk to write my check. When he slipped it to me, his words were crisp and hushed. “How did you do that?”

I said he’d have to be more specific.

“All of it,” he said. “Any of it. You’ve never—” He trailed off. I don’t think he really wanted to know, but he had to ask just the same.

I winked. “Magicians. Secrets. Never tell.”

---

“So be honest. How much of that did you actually hear?”

Raul doesn’t answer straight away, but when he does speak, I’m pleased to find that listening isn’t a completely dead art.

“How’d you do it, though?” he asks. “If the Wentz dude didn’t have all that stuff, how’d you have it? Did you sneak it in before the show?”

“A logical assumption. But remember I got there thirty minutes late, not three hours early.”

“So then how’d you do it?”

“Way I see it, kid, you’ve got two interpretations. One, I’m full of shit and none of this happened. Two, I’m magic. Which do you believe?”

“I think you’re full of shit.” He sounds sure enough. “But it’d be cool to catch a show of yours sometime.”

“You’re a good kid, Raul.”

We’re almost at the destination. He’s checking his GPS again. I can tell he wants to ask me what I’m going to get up to in the parking lot of a shuttered Toys“R”us, but he’s either too polite or too smart to pose the question. Raul pulls off the road and turns into the lot. Though the store is dead and unlit, the lot lights are still shedding their wan cones of fluorescence on the cracked blacktop. The wind tumbles soda cans and plastic bags through the islands of light and the surrounding straits of darkness.

“Is here good?” he asks. For the first time, he sounds nervous. The conveyer belt of bright cars on 167th Street aren’t even a football field away, and this kid’s making a face like he’s about to get mugged.

“Here’s perfect. Take this for your trouble.”

Tipping through the app only stuffs money into the oligarchs’ pockets, so I prefer to tip my drivers directly, just as I have since the days of palanquins and chariots.

Raul takes the check, stares at it, and tries to offer it back. “Bro, I can’t take this.”

“Sure you can. It’s made out to cash.”

“No, I mean—”

“I know what you meant. Take it—I don’t have use for it. Not anymore.”

I’m stepping out of the car when something occurs to me. “Hey, Raul. You got any more rides after this?”

“No doubt, bro, peak hours soon.”

“Raul, listen to me, don’t pick anyone else up tonight. As a matter of fact, go straight home, and when you get there, lock your doors and windows—don’t forget the windows—and don’t leave until after sunrise. Don’t unlock your door, no matter who you think you hear begging or threatening you to open up, whether it’s friends, family, cops, a woman saying she’s having a baby, or anything else. Stay inside.”

It’s the same warning I gave to the girls before leaving the O-Club.

I walk away. The car’s engine idles for a few seconds like Raul’s still thinking about it, but then the brakes squeak as he rumbles out of the lot.

Now alone, I skirt around the edge of the derelict Toys“R”Us. There’s more power to harness in this charnel house of consumer capitalism and children’s unfulfilled desires than you’d find in any cemetery. Around the backlot of the store, where workers would have once offloaded deliveries and crushed boxes, a single sickly bulb burns from a crooked post, and in that umbrella of jaundiced light, my friends are loitering.

A big, tatted-up Finance Bro in designer shades, a skeevy looking blond couple, and a cop all stand waiting for me. To the uninitiated eye, they would look entirely normal, but a closer inspection of the shadows they cast in the parking lot light, and the odd, warbling way they shift as oil swirls do on the surface of water, would tell of their unseen inner dimensions. Vast, anarchic possibilities straining against the limitations of the three-dimensional meatpuppet semblances that contain them, semblances patterned in the shape of the living sacrifices I offered to entice them into this world. If he survives the night, greedy little Mr. Wentz might discover the moldering carrion under his stage, the last gift Devin Darke left for his tawdry little house of flesh. The show’s over; now it’s the world’s turn to hide from me.

I address them, these eager Children of the Nameless come to indulge their appetite for mischief. “Friends, you may unmask now. The night’s so brief, and we’ve so much town to paint red.”

---

Host Commentary

PseudoPod Episode 889

October 27th 2023

Darke’s Last Show

Narrated by Jon Padgett

Audio Production by Chelsea Davis

Hosted by Alasdair Stuart

Welcome to the show, everyone, please take your seats and remember all of these stories are true and every card is the one you picked. We have SUCH a story for you this week. Darke’s Last Show by Jonathan Louis Duckworth opens the 2023 collection Have You Seen The Moon Tonight? & Other Rumours. As a former magic warm up act, I know what that spot feels like and I’ve never seen it done better than this.

A note about our author. Jonathan Louis Duckworth is a completely normal, entirely human person with the right number of heads and everything. He received his MFA from Florida International University and his PhD from University of North Texas. He is the author of Have You Seen the Moon Tonight? & Other Rumors (JournalStone Publishing) and his speculative fiction work appears in Pseudopod, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He is an active HWA member.#

Our narrator this week is Friend of the Show Jon Pagett and he, I promise, always has your card.

But the night is young and our time is here. The Old Science of the Dark calls to be heard and that dread truth is one we cannot deny. Not that we’d want to.

---

This story is a REAL favourite in PseudoPod Towers and Kat Day had some thoughts about it. Kat’s also almost entirely without voice at the moment so she sent them along.

 

‘There’s nothing more delightful than a story that starts with strong characters, just the right amount of description, a bit of snappy dialogue, and bish bang boom, we’re straight into the action without feeling lost. In fact, we feel instantly at home.

And followed up with a nice little hint of foreshadowing: “If only he knew how old” – perfect. It’s just like watching the beginning of a magic show with a very experienced performer – which, of course, is exactly what Jonathan Louis Duckworth IS.

He’s having fun and we’re in safe hands, even if we can’t see quite what those hands are doing.

When this story gets to the card trick. Honestly. It’s like getting to the top of a rollercoaster, isn’t it? You know your stomach is coming up through your throat and you don’t care – you’re LOVING IT.

It’s not just good fun. Duckworth, and Darke, have things to SAY. “Pretend to be a thing long enough and you’ll watch yourself become that thing.” Not just a little hint of what’s coming, also a sharp and bitter truth. Be careful you don’t find yourself pretending to be… something… for too long.

I also love the fact that Darke is very supportive of minimum wage gig economy workers and sex workers. Of course he is. He may be a warlock from the beginning of time who’s just killed one guy by means of catastrophic internal paper cuts, decapitated a couple with a saw and popped a cop by turning him into an overfilled water balloon. But he’s not a MONSTER.

Fabulous, wonderful work. The perfect end-of-October story. We LOVED this one at PseudoPod Towers and we hope you have, too.

Now. Remember… what the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.

We TOLD you it was true.’

Thanks, buddy. Rest up? The best tricks aren’t tricks. The best tricks do exactly what they look like they’re doing, and in doing so, they change how you think reality works. The rabbit is pulled not from the hat but from your mind. The card is inside the watermelon. Or the gym bro. The calls aren’t just coming from inside the house. You are the ones making them.

The first lie magicians tell is the one you participate in; it’s the trick, the promise, the turn, the prestige, the three acts written in flash paper, top hats and the phrase ‘not a lot’ echoing through the halls of British magic. The second lie magicians tell you is one of competency. We present ourselves as always being in control, being the mastermind of the theatrical grift and the honest truth of it is we’re no more in control than any other kind of performer. A guitar string snaps, a trick misfires. Someone rushes the stage, someone ties the wrong knot. Your act doesn’t have something happen every fifteen seconds so the kids’ birthday party you’re performing at to raise a little money in your last year in school turns into a flat out sprint.

I’ve lived this life. I’ve worked nightclubs and parties and theatres. I’ve watched tricks go wrong and I’ve screwed tricks up so, so badly. I used to do this thing where I’d produce twenty shot glasses from thin air behind a box with no side panels. It’s a great trick and like the best of them it works itself.

You get fewer applause if you forget to take the side panels off and instead produce twenty shot glasses from a cupboard that can clearly hold twenty shot glasses.

The third lie magicians tell you is we aren’t bothered by the terrible reputation the profession has. I wasn’t a fan of Arrested Development before I saw the ‘WE DEMAND TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY’ meme for the first time and that kind of sealed the deal. David Copperfield’s vast (And let’s face it, awesome) rock opera magic. Paul Daniels’ small, and let’s face it awesome, methodical end of the pier showmanship on Saturday evening BBC1 for eight thousand years. We’re everywhere and that ubiquity breeds complacency. Even Derren Brown, whose work is stunning, has had to work supremely hard to avoid this. I had the privilege of seeing him live a few years ago and seeing him use a set of questions to weed out troublesome possible volunteers and select the people he picked ‘at random’ from sections of the crowd was as impressive as the tricks. Magic is a defensive art, and it’s always nice to see that explored.

This story puts that lie on the table and tears it apart. The seething anger of Darke here is something that any performer of any stripe feels eventually. In this blazing tyre fire of a year for the creative arts you see it everywhere you look. Actors striking to prevent their faces being used in perpetuity and for free. Writers having struck to maintain the barest possible standard of job security. Thousands of game developers laid off in a year where one game sold 2.5 million copies in 24 hours. No one hates creatives more than the people who rely on them to make a living and almost no type of creative is more hated than magicians. We’re the end of the pier, the ironic act of last resort, all sequinned jackets and forced patter and playing cards no one ever uses.

Until we aren’t.

The final lie magicians tell is the first lie we tell; we can be trusted. Ricky Jay, once produced a one foot square ice cube from thin air. John Lenahan, another of my heroes, wrapped magic in comedy so well constructed we didn’t see it coming until the impossible appeared centre stage. Tommy Cooper made a career out of that. David Copperfield too.

That end of the pier chintz is a cloak we choose to wear. The over-the-top music is to distract you from what we’re really doing and, sometimes, to distract us from what we could do. Like Darke, here, tonight, taking one last bow before the carnage really and truly begins. Enjoy the show. He will. Thanks, as ever, to all.

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Escape Artists always needs more volunteers from the audience and we promise you’ll have a better time than Darke’s volunteers. We’re an independent production you see, and entirely donation powered and that’s where you come in. We rely on you to pay our authors, staff and cover our costs. There’s a recession, a pandemic and yet here we are, making art for you. We can only do that if you help us.

We’ve got Paypal and Patreon subscriptions that start at 5 bucks a month.Both get you access to our audio archive. The Patreon subscription tiers get you all sorts of goodies at the higher levels. Please help out if you can. It’s always needed. Also now we’re a non-profit you have some very real tax benefits to helping us tell more stories in addition to getting more stores from us. So it’s a win two different ways.

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PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative

Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license.

We’ll be back in a few short days because we would not leave you hanging for Horror Christmas. Our story for Halloween will be Twin Axolotls of Sorrow and Salt by Russell Hemmel, read by Leila Al-Jeboury. Chelsea will be on audio production for that and for this year’s Halloween Parade. The churros are on us.

We’ll see you then but before we do PsuedoPod wants to remind you Magicians. Secrets. Never tell.