Floods 6 by Colin Thompson

Author:Colin Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2008-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

The three young men all squeezed inside the cabinet. Brenda locked the door with five chains and ten padlocks and then the Great Klunko said the magic words.

‘Alakazoo, alakazaam, alakaseltzer…’

What should have happened next is that Brenda should have pressed a hidden button, which would let off a big flash of magnesium smoke while the trapdoor opened and the three louts fell through on to the mattress.

But what actually happened was far more exciting.

The cabinet rose in the air until it was three metres, four metres, five metres above the stage. The whole theatre held its breath as it hung in the air surrounded by tiny sparks of lightning.

The lightning grew stronger, big flashes sparking all around the cabinet and out over the audience’s heads. For a whole minute the cabinet hung there defying gravity, and then there was an almighty clap of thunder and it came crashing down onto the stage, shattering into a thousand pieces. There was another blinding flash of light and there was the cabinet, all back in one piece, looking as shiny as the day it had been made. Its door flew open to reveal a few remaining flashes of lightning dancing around inside it and three pairs of shoes. The louts were nowhere to be seen.

The audience erupted in the loudest cheers the Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda had ever heard in their whole forty-two years on the stage. In fact, if you added all the cheers they had ever heard together, this was better.

‘Quick, slip downstairs and see that the boys are all right,’ the magician whispered to Brenda.

‘But, but … I didn’t press the button,’ Brenda whispered back. She went to check the mattress below the stage anyway.

The audience were on their feet cheering for a full five minutes.

‘They’re not there,’ said Brenda. ‘There’s no sign of them.’

Mordonna walked down to the edge of the stage, took off her sunglasses, looked up and caught the Great Klunko’s eye.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Just carry on with your act.’

The magician and his assistant both looked down at Mordonna and felt great waves of peace and happiness sweep over them. The happiness tide had been out for a very long time in their lives, so long that they had never expected it to return, but now they felt as happy as they had the day they had first met and fallen in love.

‘Everything will be wonderful,’ Mordonna whispered to them. ‘Just do all your regular tricks and they will be brilliant.’ She sat down again.

Meanwhile, in a sausage factory in a small town in Belgium – a factory that, many years before, had been a small theatre – three speechless louts had appeared in the Sausage Twisting and Snipping Room. Four young Belgian girls, who had been twisting and snipping sausages before sending them down the conveyor belt into the Sausage Boiling and Wrapping Room, stood open-mouthed as an ever-growing mountain of untwisted and unsnipped sausages began to pile up round their feet.

‘Why is there a sausage factory underneath the theatre?’ said one of the young men.

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