That seemed like a silly idea, the floor being the same stuff as the wall and ceiling. He knelt down and scratched at the surface, but it was as unyielding as the rest of the room.
“How about the door? Try the door.”
“Door's gone,” he replied, feeling foolish. How could the door be gone? He knew it was part of the trick, but the fact was that a door no longer existed.
Crossing to where he entered, Jamie Forbes threw his shoulder against what looked like stone but may have been stuccoed plywood. He tried that, succeeded in bruising his shoulder. How did the whole place get to be rock?
“There's a way out,” said Blacksmyth again. “Can you tell us what it is?”
Jamie Forbes was tired and frustrated. Whatever was going on, the trick was getting old. No doors, no windows, no keys, no ropes or wires or pulleys, no tools, no known combination of touching this slab then that one. If there were a way out, some secret password that needed shouting, he hadn't a clue.
“Give up?”
Instead of answering, he backed against one side of the room, ran three steps and gave a flying kick to the other. He wound up on the ground, of course, the wall unmarked.
“Yeah,” he said, getting up again. “I give.”
“Here's the answer,” came Blacksmyth's voice, filled with drama. “Jamie, walk through the wall!”
The man's gone mad, he thought, he's lost it in the middle of his show. “I can't do that,” he said, a little sullen. “I don't walk through walls.”
“Jamie, I'm going to tell you the truth. I am not kidding. The walls are in your mind. You can walk through them if you believe you can.”
He rested his hand, at arm's length, on the stone. “Yeah,” he said, “right.”
“OK, Jamie. I'll give it all awa
y for you, right now; I'll give the whole trick away. You don't recall this, but you've been hypnotized. There are no walls around you. You are standing on a stage in the Lafayette Hotel in Long Beach, California, and you are the only person in this hall who believes that you've been walled in.”
The stone didn't flicker. “Why are you doing this to me,” he asked. “Are you doing this for fun?”
“Yes, Jamie,” said Blacksmyth gently. “We are doing this for fun. You volunteered for this and for so long as you live, you shall never forget what is happening today.”
“Help me, please,” he said, not a trace of pride or anger.
“I'll help you help yourself,” said Blacksmyth. “We need never be prisoner of our own beliefs. At the count of three, I shall walk through the stone at one side of the room. I shall take your hand in mine and we shall walk together through the wall on the other side. And you will be free.”
What does one say to that? Jamie chose silence.
“One,” came the hypnotist's voice. “Two. . . .”Long pause. “Three.”
All at once, it was as Blacksmyth had said. For an instant, Jamie caught a blurry twisted place in the stone, as though it were dry water; the next instant Blacksmyth in his spotless tuxedo stepped through the wall into the prison, offering his hand.
Flooded with relief, Jamie took the man's hand. “I didn't think . . .”
The hypnotist neither slowed nor replied, striding toward the stone on the opposite side of the room, pulling his subject with him.
It must have sounded like a scream, though he didn't mean it that way. From Jamie Forbes came a cry of fearsome baffled astonishment.
Blacksmyth's body disappeared into the stone. For an instant Jamie held tightly to a disembodied arm, whose wrist and hand moved forward, drawing him directly into the wall.
Whatever next sound he gave might have been muffled by the wall, and in the following instant there was a click like the snap of fingers and he stood back on stage, holding Mr. Blacksmyth's hand, blinking in the spotlight, enveloped in fascinated applause.
The people he could see, in the first rows before the dark behind the spotlights, were rising to their feet, a standing ovation for the hypnotist, and in an odd way, for himself.
The act was Blacksmyth's finale. He left his subject soaked in applause, disappeared into the wings, returned twice to the stage before the sound of the crowd hushed to gentle patter and the murmur of many voices, folks gathering their programs, jackets and purses as the house lights came up.
Jamie Forbes made his way unsteadily down the steps to the main floor, a few of the audience there to smile and thank him for his courage to volunteer: “Was it real, did it feel real to you, the stone and all?”