The meanest Flood

and placed them on a chair by the window. He stood far enough back so that he couldn’t be seen from the street but could still watch the length of it. Magic is like an iceberg, most of it is not visible, happening beneath the surface; so much of it is confined to preparation and unseen by the audience. It’s such a waste, Danny thought inside his head, hearing his mother’s voice speaking the words.
    And he watched the big man with the shark’s tooth around his neck come back into the street. The something different about him was so pointed and obvious that for a while Danny couldn’t understand what it was. The man had developed a limp, and it wasn’t a slight injury that Danny could have overlooked the first time he came to the door. It was as if he had been in a road accident of some kind. He winced every time his foot touched the pavement and the bad leg shot up into the air and described a wide arc which upset the man’s balance. From time to time as he came along the street he had to reach out for the support of a wall or a gate.
    Go away, Danny said under his breath. Everything was set now, the last thing he needed was this great oaf banging on the door again. If he was collecting debts, Sam Turner would never come home while he was waiting on the doorstep.
    The crippled man stopped at the door and lifted the knocker. He hammered it rhythmically for nearly half a minute. The sound penetrated every corner of the house. The woman on the bed struggled against the rope that bound her.
    Danny crouched and did some deep breathing exercises. He tried to wish the man away, astral travelling in reverse; he pictured a spiritual wind taking the man up and away from the house, depositing him on the steeple of some distant country church.
    But the hammering on the door started again, that same rhythmic beat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat.
    The urgency of his knocking demanded a response, he obviously refused to consider there might be no one in. Danny wondered if the man had been standing on the street corner and had seen the woman arrive. Because if he had he obviously wasn’t going to go away until he got some satisfaction.
    The magician crept down the stairs clutching his bayonet. He stood by the front door and listened to the knocking. For a moment it stopped and the big man on the street pushed open the letter-box and looked inside. ‘I know you’re in there,’ he shouted. ‘I’m not going until you answer the door.’
    Danny sighed. He couldn’t place the accent. Somewhere in the Midlands. Might be Leicester or Derby but he didn’t think so.
    When the big man closed the letter-box and started banging again the magician decided to answer the door. He walked across the room towards the stairs. He’d have to dress again first, but there didn’t seem to be another way round it.
    ‘I’m coming,’ he yelled. The banging stopped abruptly. ‘Give me a couple of minutes,’ Danny shouted.
    The banging on the door started up again and he took the stairs two at a time. This was ridiculous. Some neighbour might take it into her head to ring the police, complaining about noise pollution.
    At the top of the stairs he was about to enter Sam Turner’s bedroom to get his clothes when he heard something from the back bedroom, a sound like a footfall. Although he was already in motion to deal with the banging on the front door and didn’t want to be distracted, two other thoughts entered his head simultaneously. One was to investigate the new sound and the other was the dawning realization that he had been set up, that Turner was in the house with him and that the woman was still alive.
    Before he had time to move in either direction the back bedroom door opened and Sam Turner came at him along the landing. Danny lifted the bayonet, realizing that this wasn’t how it had been planned. The woman was supposed to die first. Turner came at him with a doublefooted drop-kick, something the magician had never witnessed in real life and never imagined would be used against him. He recognized it only from watching wrestling on the television with Jody on a Saturday afternoon.
    He slashed at Turner’s legs with the bayonet and caught a glimpse of blood before Sam Turner’s booted feet connected with his bare chest. He tottered there for a moment, at the head of the stairs, but he always knew that he was going down.
    He grabbed for the banister, missed and dived headfirst down the staircase. The magician had never