HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

26 H . P . L O V E C R A F T ’S M A G A Z IN E O F H O R R O R
“Now, this trick is conventionally performed with a
handsaw,” our master of misdirection told us, “but there is
absolutely no reason why we can’t update it with something
like this!”
We all gasped as he produced a chainsaw from within his
flapping cape and gunned the engine with enthusiasm.
“Cool!” said Jonah Jones.
Mister King looked very dashing standing there by the
blackboard in full evening dress with petrol fumes rather than
bad language turning the air blue around him. Unlike the rest of
our teachers at Boleskin House, he was a stage magician, and a
class act at that.
“Abracadabra!” he cried as the chainsaw bit into the middle
of the plywood box. A cloud of sawdust joined the exhaust
smoke and then a crimson gout of liquid sprayed out of Malky’s
mouth.
“Cool!” said Jonah again.
I didn’t say anything. This was supposed to be a conjuring
trick, not a human sacrifice.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Mister King said to Malky, “that sometimes
happens.” Our teacher wiped the red splashes from his
pupil’s face with a Paisley-pattern handkerchief,
“Why?” asked Malky, much to our surprise.
“Bakers get bored sometimes, my boy. They have little
guns to inject the jam into their doughnuts. They’re only supposed
to give each one a single squirt, but sometimes they fire
twice or three times, just for devilment. When someone bites
into it, the pressure make it explode.”
“Still tastes good,” Malky replied, licking his lips.
We were summoned to pull the two halves of the box apart.
Jonah peered into the lower part hoping for a glimpse of
Malky’s guts, but his undamaged legs unfolded from the upper
section. The bottom of his pullover did look pretty frayed,
though.
Mister King sent us all back to our seats with a doughnut
each. He was our favorite teacher and his Friday afternoon lessons
were the most fun we had all week. It beat free-style spontaneous
combustion or levitating without a net—and left fewer
scars.
“So, boys, there you have it,” he said gesturing to the diagram
explaining the trick on the blackboard. “Sawing the lady
in half or, as the case may be, taking a chainsaw to a big-boned
lad. Yet another example of the noble art of sleight of hand,
legerdemain or prestidigitation.”
Mister King sat on the edge of his desk and doffed his
shiny top hat. “Now listen to me closely, class—‘stage magic’
as your other teachers no doubt contemptuously call it is ninety-nine
percent of any kind of sorcery. From the rain-forest
shaman to the magus in his ivory tower, the humble illusion
shoulders most of the load in making other people believe that
these adepts have true magical abilities. And belief is the essential
ingredient to any miracle . . .”
He twirled a length of chalk between his fingers as he
spoke and one end of it suddenly began to flap in a rubbery
way. Unperturbed, Mister King popped this end between his
lips and started to chew. Somehow he had turned his chalk
into cheese.
There was a polite knock at the classroom door and we all
turned to see who it was.
“Mister King,” said an old woman in a twin set, “may I
have a moment of your time?”
“Why certainly, my dear. To whom do I have the pleasure
of speaking.”
“I,” she said with a dramatic pause, “am Miss Sim, Miss
Sheila Sim.”
“Excellent!” Mister King cried, producing a bouquet of
flowers for her from up his sleeve. “Boys, stand up and welcome
your new drama teacher!”
-iss Sim had no time for political correctness. She was
old-school even by comparison with some of the
dinosaurs who taught at Boleskin House. Our drama
teacher wore her spinsterhood with pride and despised the
neologism “Ms.” “It sounds like a bluebottle trapped in a bedpan,”
she liked to say with a sneer. Besides, since her first name
was Sheila, she thought that Miss S. Sim had a nicely palindromic
ring to it. Of course, it also had enough sibilants to keep
a nest of vipers happy, but that’s another story.
If you think I’m laboring the point here, it’s because names
have a vital significance within the benighted walls of this institution.
Boleskin House is one of the few reform schools which
specialize in the black arts. If a kid suddenly starts to show
some talent for the paranormal and is unlucky enough to get
caught, then he’s whisked away to this dump before you can say
“child-care services” or “due legal process.” Of course, wild talents
run stronger in girls, but they get banged up somewhere
down the road, more’s the pity.
The curriculum mostly consists of classes in heavy-duty
arcana designed to amplify our powers, which is pretty ironic
since even low-grade magical abilities are what allow the
Government to take you off the streets in the first place.
However, there’s recently been a slight change of educational
policy at Boleskin. After the disastrous Blitzkrieg tournament
that my class was press-ganged into—where the body counts
were higher than the scores—the Head, the bodiless blob that
runs this hellhole, decided there might be more to school
morale than being “good at games.”
Enter Miss Sim, a thespian of a certain age employed to
expand our creative sides and let us indulge in a little selfexpression
by staging the Christmas play. They said that they
wanted to make us more fully rounded individuals . . . As an
idea, it had about as much merit as trying to teach a troop of
baboons to juggle with live hand-grenades.
“Now, class,” she told us the next morning in the school’s
flea-pit of a theatre, “I know you’re all probably annoyed that
you have to spend your weekend working with me, but the
Head should have made it clear at assembly that the alternative
will be even less to your liking.”
She wasn’t kidding. We either rehearsed the school play or
we did cross-country running—after being parachuted into an
unfriendly country.
“The school board has decided that this year’s production
will be the only known dramatic work by Doctor Dee,” she
announced.