Read The Manual of Darkness Online

Authors: Enrique de Heriz

The Manual of Darkness

Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne
Contents
 

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

About the Author

Also by Enrique de Hériz

Epigraph

Part One

The Green Door

Populus Vult Decipi

As If By Magic

Ants Have No Ears

Aces and Kings

Something Very Strange

A Line of Fire

If They Made Me a King

An Exciting Case

Papá is Asleep

An Island

The Seybert Commission

Peace

Children of God

A Map of the World

Grouse, according to Galván

A Trick at Every Table

One Bloody Nerve, Víctor

Dust Thou Art

The Queen Mother

Double Feature

0.2 Per Cent

Mr Lápidus

Counting Steps

Nothing More Invisible than Air

The Future

A Madman Walking

A Sausage Inside a Sausage

Sparks in his Hand

Burn, O Earth!

Starting Over

Even Though You Cannot See Me

23°C

A Just Man

Music for the Spirits

Before, Now, After

Emptiness

The Besieged City

Part Two

One Year

Irina

Ants

‘Al Dente’

So Let’s Talk

The Wellspring

The Gallery of Famous Blind People: I

Opening and Closing

There Is Not A Place

Light is God

Behind the Mirror

Free Bar

Light Years

Here is Your Shadow

The Gallery of Famous Blind People: II

A Trail of Ants

Manners Of Speaking

Down Is Where You Fall

Moving

If you weren’t so crazy

The Light of Your Life

And Have Not

The Gallery of Famous Blind People: III

Leave her alone, Víctor

Without Edges

Cliffwood Beach

The Auzinger Toy

The Gallery of Famous Blind People: IV

The Last Step before the Last Step

Your First Egg

I’ll Wait Here For You

Tickles

A Double Grief

Fire

References

Acknowledgements

Copyright

To Pere, up and down

Enrique de Hériz was born in Barcelona in 1964. He has worked as an editor and translator, including translations to Spanish of the work of Annie Proulx, Nadine Gordimer, Stephen King, Peter Carey, and John Fowles. His first novel,
Lies
, won the Llibreter prize in Spain.

Also by Enrique de Hériz
Lies

‘We must conclude that man is this: someone who looks upon things and knows the names of them.’

Carmen Gándara, from the story ‘The Ball of Paper’

‘It is just in this way that otherwise sensible people allow their senses to be deceived, and their imaginations preyed upon’

Harry Kellar, in
A Magician’s Tour

‘These grosser physical manifestations can be but the mere ooze and scum cast up by the waves on the idle pebble, the waters of a heaven-lit sea, if it exist, must lie far out beyond.’

Horace Howard Furness ‘Preliminary report of the Seybert Commission for Investigating Modern Spiritualism’, University of Pennsylvania, 1887

part
one
The Green Door
 

T
here are only a few steps between him and the green door – eleven, twelve, maybe. It is too dark to count them. Víctor Losa stops, takes a deep breath; this, he thinks, is the happiest moment of his life. He did not feel like this a week ago in Lisbon when he was named World’s Best Magician at the FISM World Championship. Nor will he still feel this way a moment from now when he reaches the landing, opens the green door and steps into the room to receive an ovation from the professional magicians of Barcelona, gathered at the behest of his former teacher Mario Galván to pay tribute to him. He knows that this is a haven, a hiatus in life, a vantage point offered to him by time.

He does not want to jump for joy, to rush up the stairs and revel in the applause that awaits him. No, he wants to stay here, to float, to hover above this moment. He has his reasons, for this is where it all began. It was here, twenty-two years ago, after his first lesson with Galván, that he overheard the curious prediction from the master’s lips: ‘That little wretch is going to be one hell of a magician.’ He was standing on these stairs, who knows, perhaps on this very step, petrified, listening to the voice behind the door, muttering words the maestro could not have known he might overhear. So it is hardly surprising that Víctor should want to stop here, halfway up the stairs, to relive that moment when he heard the maestro make his prediction through gritted teeth, and revel in the long series of triumphs that have led from that moment to this.

As he is about to climb the last remaining steps, Víctor looks up and gets the fright of his life: the green door has vanished. It is still there, of course, it has to be; but he cannot see it. Instead he sees a milky stain, a whitish halo as though he were looking at the
world through a veil. He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes. When he looks again, the door is there in front of him, scruffy, the paint peeling, just as it has always been. Things disappear and reappear in unexpected ways. No one knows that more than he does.

It was an optical illusion, one he can easily put down to lack of sleep, due to some rather extravagant celebrating of late. Besides, it lasted only a second or two. It can’t be anything serious; it cannot account for the fear that suddenly grips Víctor, rooting him to this spot as though the air on which only a moment before he felt he could float has suddenly turned to cement.

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