The meanest Flood

container. He goes to great lengths to convince his onlookers that there are no secret chambers or drawers or compartments within the container. And then, hey presto, he withdraws from within it a dove or a rabbit or a rag of silk. The trick is in the presentation of the container and this woman, like the last one, is part of that process. Her death creates an impression, it draws the eyes of those involved in a certain direction. It distracts them from the truth.
    But Danny smiled to himself. Only a certain audience would see it that way. Another crowd would be transfixed by the power of the metaphor. They would witness transformation. They would feel themselves to be in the presence of magic. And as every magician knows, no audience is an accident. An audience is created, coaxed into being, moulded by the man with the secrets; the virtuoso on the stage.
    The man, the husband, was already dead. The magician had had to dispose of him in the early hours of the morning. He had carried the body to a spare bedroom and dumped it on a bare mattress. He didn’t want that smell in the same room as the woman, in their bedroom where Danny would have to go to work on her at the appointed time. The man was gone but that didn’t stop Danny from checking on him throughout the night. He had been a small man in life and now he was a small cadaver. There was that distinctive mark on the bridge of his nose that indicated his use of spectacles. His hair was thinning and he had delicate wrists like a woman. He was a specialist in phenomenology at the University of Leeds and his profession and Danny’s were not so distant in essence. They were both privy to the secrets of intuition.
    Before rigor mortis occurred the magician had gone to the spare bedroom and laid the corpse out, placing its hands on its chest, closing its eyes and wiping away the clotted blood from its forehead. There was a sense of distant kinship about it, as though in life they had shared a slice of the same reality. If it had been possible to keep the man alive the magician thought they might have become friends or fellow researchers.
    Black silk pyjamas, he was wearing. A red hand-embroidered motif over the breast pocket identified one of the man’s heroes: Heidegger. Danny had tried to read philosophy, feeling that it might have bearing on his life, and from time to time he would try again. But the terminology and the way that philosophical writers tended to be trapped in the jargon of their subject always defeated him. He didn’t understand them but he was glad that they were there. One didn’t have to understand everything. Secrets were important.
    Danny, like many other boys of his age, had discovered magic during the period of adolescence. While the child’s physical body was being transformed into maturity and when the mind and soul was confined in doubt and insecurity there took place an unconscious search for power. Ultimate power is control and dominance over others and it is achieved by those who know the secret of transformation. As a twelve-year-old boy if you can change the Queen of Hearts into the Ace of Spades while all around look on amazed, it doesn’t matter if your History teacher thinks you are lumpen and the Science teacher refers to you as pond-life. What do they know, these people? They don’t know secrets, they can’t see the processes of alchemy taking hold of your being.
    It would be possible to bring the man back to life.
    Diamond Danny was under no illusions. He didn’t have the kind of magic that could accomplish such a feat. He didn’t know anyone who could do it, had never in his life met anyone who could do it. But what did that mean? It only meant that he hadn’t come across that person. It didn’t mean that that person didn’t exist. Jesus of Nazareth had brought people back from the dead. He had even resurrected himself.
    What happens once can happen again.
    A secret learned can never be lost. Not completely.
    Only a few ingredients were missing from the corpse on the mattress. His heart was not beating, his lungs were not expanding and contracting, floating their filigree wings in the oxygenated cave of his chest, and the gushing streams of dusky red and blue blood were sticky and congealed against their venous banks.
    But a word can start or stop a heart. If the right word at the right time is known and uttered.
    All magicians know these things.
    Danny took a high-backed chair to the bay window and watched the