Einstein looked baffled. ‘What?’

  ‘I know what to do.’ Mileva wiped her eyes. ‘Come with me, darling. It’s going to take both of us. I’m not letting you do it on your own again.’ She picked up the embellished saucepan and placed it on her own head. ‘It’s not a very elegant bonnet.’ Then she took Albert’s hands in hers. ‘We’re going to imagine. Imagination’s what the starfish need, isn’t it, Doctor?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘There’s something Albert and I imagined for a long time … What our life might have been like … with Lieserl, the baby we had last year.’ Mileva’s voice trembled. She took a breath and said more firmly, ‘Albert, imagine with me. Imagine Lieserl, the daughter they made us give away. Imagine what she is doing now.’

  Albert said, ‘She is sleeping.’

  ‘Yes. What is her room like? The room we have never seen, in the home of the people we have never met.’

  ‘It is … white. With green curtains and a white dresser.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Mileva. ‘And she sleeps in a white cot that hangs from a cradle. It rocks her asleep.’

  ‘When she wakes,’ Albert said, ‘she will go out in her pram …’

  The Doctor pulled on Yaz’s arm. ‘Time to get back to work. I’m going to send the ultraviolet beam through the amplifier.’ She twisted a setting on the sonic and plugged it back into the machine. Instantly, the whole sky was alight with floating stars. Yaz and the Doctor began to pluck the feather-light creatures out of the air and thrust them into the tea chest as fast as they could.

  ‘Before long, she will be taking her first steps,’ Mileva was saying.

  ‘Early,’ said Albert. ‘She is our child – she will be early to do everything. Clever, a little scientist.’

  ‘Going on adventures. Pond-dipping. Splashing in puddles. Riding a bicycle.’

  ‘I see her wearing a red dress,’ Albert said.

  ‘With yellow daisies,’ Mileva continued.

  ‘And matching red shoes.’

  ‘With white socks.’

  ‘Doctor,’ said Yaz, trying to squash down the creatures inside the tea chest, ‘we need another box.’ Above Albert and Mileva, a new cloud started to swirl into being. ‘Doctor, it’s happening again! He’s losing it!’

  ‘No,’ the Doctor said, a grin spreading over her face. ‘Look. It’s not made of smoke. It’s made of light.’ Indeed, the cloud that was forming over the couple’s heads was bright white, flashes of silver darting in and out.

  ‘One day,’ said Albert to Mileva, ‘we will see her again …’

  And the cloud of light took shape, a figure in a dress and socks and shoes, holding a bunch of wildflowers and laughing.

  ‘It’s her,’ said Yaz. ‘It’s Lieserl.’

  Mileva and Albert looked up too, and Mileva whispered, ‘My little girl.’

  ‘Our little girl,’ countered Albert. ‘The brightest star in the universe.’

  Lieserl smiled down at Albert and Mileva and released her flowers, which turned into a shower of petals. Then she held out her arms, and the starfish flowed towards her like a river. She folded them into her arms, her pockets, into her hair and dress, until her whole being was illuminated with them.

  ‘Their minds are creating the solution,’ the Doctor said softly to Yaz. ‘Incredible.’

  In the cathedral, a hush fell over the crowd as every single person looked up at the stars of light that had appeared way up in the ceiling. ‘What are they?’ breathed Ryan.

  Graham shook his head, wonderingly. ‘It’s like something out of Disney.’

  ‘Look at the pretty lights, Mama,’ said Johanna as the glowing stars began to drift out through the broken windows. Friedrich hugged her to him as Marthe burst into happy tears.

  ‘Come on,’ Ryan said to Graham, ‘outside!’ He led the way over to the nearest door, pushing past the awestruck police officer and unbarring it. ‘Wow.’

  Münsterplatz was illuminated by thousands of floating lights streaming overhead, driven by invisible currents. Lights flowed from windows, from roofs, from towers and pavements as the first rays of dawn painted thin stripes across the sky.

  ‘Grace would’ve loved this,’ said Graham quietly.

  More and more people came out, curious to see the sight. And, as the river of stars flowed by, more and more children inside the cathedral opened their eyes.

  When Lieserl had tucked the very last starfish into her hair, she smiled down again and waved to her parents. Then she took a little breath and shrank to the size of a flower, which floated down into the box of starfish. Yaz fitted the lid, and there was silence.

  The Doctor, inevitably, broke it. ‘Nicely done, you two. Sorry about your gramophone, by the way. And your forks. Still, who needs forks, eh?’

  Mileva smiled at her. ‘Forks can be replaced. Hearts and minds cannot.’

  ‘You know …’ Albert looked around the room, taking in the high ceilings and the tall windows in the early morning light. ‘This would be the perfect place to be married.’

  ‘Here?’ said Yaz.

  ‘Why not? It’s not Jewish, nor Catholic – if we marry here, we can annoy both sets of parents.’ Einstein grinned impishly at Mileva, who laughed.

  A familiar wheezing sound reached their ears. Yaz dashed to the window. ‘It can’t be!’

  Down in the street outside stood a familiar blue box. ‘Doctor, why is the TARDIS here?’

  ‘It’s a younger TARDIS,’ said the Doctor, looking slightly embarrassed. ‘We’re going to have to run, Yaz. Remember I said I mustn’t bump into myself? Looks like I’ve just arrived.’ She turned to Mileva and Albert. ‘So sorry we can’t stay. But don’t worry – you’re in very good hands, I promise. Just don’t tell him a thing about any of this.’ She winked. ‘You’re fairly good at making things up … C’mon, Yaz, grab the other handle of this box.’

  Yaz gave Mileva a hug, and shook Albert’s hand. ‘It was amazing to meet you both,’ she said. ‘I think you’re going to have a fantastic wedding.’

  Between them, the Doctor and Yaz carried the tea chest to the top of the exterior staircases. Someone with a shock of curly brown hair was making his way up. ‘Down the other side!’ hissed the Doctor urgently. ‘Ah!’ they heard a booming voice say as the figure reached the top. ‘Good, I’m glad there’s someone here. I heard there’s been some unusual goings-on …’

  ‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ said the Doctor under her breath, as she and Yaz ducked out of the building and onto the Rathausplatz. ‘Never mind. We’ll miss the wedding – but I miss Ryan and Graham more!’

  The crowds in Münsterplatz were bathed in pale dawn light by the time Yaz and the Doctor arrived. ‘It’s about time,’ said Graham, coming to meet them. ‘We’ve had all sorts here – rats, comas, blood, floating stars.’

  ‘Really?’ said the Doctor. ‘That sounds very exciting.’

  ‘What’s in the box?’ asked Ryan.

  ‘Floating stars,’ said Yaz.

  ‘Ask a silly question,’ said Graham.

  ‘Those light things,’ said Ryan, ‘is that where they went?’

  ‘With a bit of encouragement,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘Everyone here is all right now, then?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Graham. ‘All the kids are awake, and they’re hungry, so I reckon they’re fine.’

  The Doctor nodded, satisfied. ‘They’re not the only ones. I know this little diner on Fantabulax II. Does the best cheeseburgers. We just need to make a quick stop first to drop off these little fellas somewhere they can’t do any damage.’ She patted the box. ‘Pretty things, weigh almost nothing, nearly destroyed a city. Never judge a book by its cover.’ Graham and Ryan took hold of the box, and the four friends started threading their way through the square back to the park.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Graham. ‘What about Einstein? Did you get to see him?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said the Doctor. ‘Bless him and his bonkersly marvellous brain.’

  ‘Can’t we meet him?’ asked Ryan. ‘I thought that was the whole point of coming here.’

  ‘Think the TARDIS had her own ideas about that,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Glad we could sort things out,’ said Yaz as they reached their TARDIS. ‘No more ghostly nightmares.’

  ‘Oh, there’ll always be nightmares.’ The Doctor opened the door and ushered in her friends. ‘You can’t get rid of them; they’ll always be popping up in one form or another. But the thing about dreams is – the good ones are always stronger than the bad.’

  The door clicked shut.

  Who-Dini?

  Steve Cole

  It’s the travel that’s the greatest. Seventeen years old and I’ve seen more states and stages than some dancing girls see in a lifetime. Chicago, right now and for eight weeks, the brand new Uptown theatre: fancy as a palace but even better with those amazing neon hoardings outside, singing its name from North Side clear across the city.

  There’s four thousand seats inside, and each and every one is taken each and every night: people watching and gasping and paying up to a dollar-fifty a ticket as the great Harry Houdini ties me up and turns me into a butterfly, or conjures me out of the giant radio in my glittering outfit. It’s like I’m living in a dream. Mr and Mrs H have taken small-time Dorothy Smith and treated her like their big-time daughter. They couldn’t have kids themselves, I heard, but to them, me and Judy and the other six new assistants, and their prop guys of course, we’re all one big family.

  Course, every family has secrets. The Houdinis depend on them, thrive on them, live them day and night. And because Mr and Mrs H are magical folk, so are their secrets. We drag them in crates across the country in a 60-foot railway car, to only the finest places, and what’s real, what isn’t, it all kind of melts and makes something new.

  In Baltimore, not long after we opened, I walked in on Mrs H in the dressing room, and she was at the back looking into this big table mirror. Only it wouldn’t show my reflection, like I wasn’t really there. And I saw that Mrs H’s face was young again, no more than my age, just gazing back at her.

  ‘Leave me, Dorothy,’ Mrs H murmured like she was half asleep. Only then did the reflection catch up and mouth the words. Well, I was scared; I turned round and left and walked round in a daze. Later on, I got up nerve to sneak back when the dressing room was empty and I saw there wasn’t even any glass in that mirror. It was just air and empty.

  Yesterday I saw her in Houdini’s arms backstage. Only, I’d just brought a coffee to Houdini in the star dressing room where he was resting up ahead of his performance – he’d been out all day – so who the heck was this? Course, Houdini does a new illusion in this show, where he seems to get killed in a locked cabinet on the stage and then thirty seconds later he bursts out at the back of the auditorium, swinging on a trapeze. It brings down the house at the close of the second act. Only he can’t wish himself through empty space, so …

  There’s got to be an impersonator, right?

  I said so yesterday to Billy, one of the new male assistants brought in by Mr Collins. Billy’s in his twenties and he has the dreamiest eyes, like the best blue marbles. ‘I reckon as how you’re right,’ he said, ‘gotta be an impersonator,’ but he had a smile on his face like he knew better.

  It’s a real good double, for sure. When he lands on the stage, holding up his arms, he looks just like the real deal, and sounds just like him too when he thanks the audience. Maybe he kisses Mrs H just like him?

  It’s like he knew what I was thinking, this man, cos he turned and looked at me, startled, and you couldn’t mistake those eyes, the stare, the commanding air. I mean, it was Houdini.

  Only now – somehow – he looked just the age he’d have been when he and Mrs H first met.

  I didn’t say anything, I just turned and left. I didn’t even know where I was going. I wanted to find Billy, to tell him what I’d seen – that I was right, it was an impersonator, and now he was impersonating with Mrs H. But Billy was nowhere to be found, and in the end I found myself outside the door of the older Houdini in his star dressing room and I felt so bad for him, but I thought, I can’t tell him. Because I didn’t want to rock this lovely boat I’d wound up in.

  I knocked, and the door was yanked open by Houdini. He was on the telephone and looked real worked up. When he spoke on stage, he made sure to sound clear and precise, like a stern professor reading aloud from a textbook. Now the accented voice was hot with rage: ‘I haven’t taken a damn thing from you, Gladstone. I was in the theatre all day yesterday and have witnesses who will swear to it. And believe me, had I wanted to get into this lock-up of yours, I would have!’ Houdini slammed down the receiver and then he looked ready to do the same to me: ‘What is it, Dorothy?’

  I had not seen him so angry before. ‘Are you, uh, OK, Mr Houdini?’

  ‘That old fool Gladstone and his insinuations.’ He was twisting at the big old ring he wore on his index finger. ‘All these years and still these hacks and has-beens paw at my reputation. Always trying to tear me down to their level so my pockets are easier to pick.’

  ‘You’re top of the tree, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Of course I am.’ He sat down on the bed, weary. ‘There is no contrivance on Earth from which the Great Houdini cannot free himself, isn’t that so?’

  ‘The whole world knows that.’

  ‘When you are older, my dear, you will come to realise that there are some things from which no one can escape. Not even the Great Houdini.’

  His piercing eyes, as he looked at me, were exactly those of his double’s.

  I didn’t know what to say. I made my excuses and left, hurried back through the dark warren that threaded the theatre’s innards like veins. I was scared I’d run into Houdini’s impostor again, but in fact I ran into Mrs H. She was alone on the stage and she stood, still as a mannequin, surrounded by the outsized props from the act that Mr Collins made. It looked kind of like they were ganging up on her.

  Billy stepped up beside me, made me jump. ‘You look like you saw a ghost,’ he said.

  ‘I saw Houdini’s double from the act,’ I whispered.

  His eyes widened. ‘You did?’

  ‘And Mrs H and him, they were … well. I think that they were …’

  Billy smiled. ‘Working on a grand new finish for the show?’

  I blinked. Was that what I’d seen? It could’ve been. Just part of an act, and all innocent. If I’d gone blabbing to Mr H …

  ‘You ever get homesick, Dorothy?’ Billy asked suddenly.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I shook my head. ‘There’s so much to do and see.’

  ‘Some day, I reckon you will,’ he said. ‘The places where you grew, the people you knew – that helped make you what you are.’

  I kept my eyes on Mrs H so he couldn’t see me blush when I said to him, ‘What about the people you’re going to get to know – the ones who might make you better?’

  ‘You get tired of looking,’ said Billy. ‘When do you stop? In the end you have to settle someplace. Look at Mrs H – she’s settled for a stage.’

  I watched Mrs H as she put her hand to the wide wooden sides of the big Radio of 1950, the same prop I jumped out of each night doing the Charleston; the job she’d have done twenty years ago.

  ‘Guess a stage can be any place,’ I said. I looked round, but Billy had gone.

  I wanted to keep talking. But I guess I’ll get my chance. We’re on tour for 36 weeks, 8 of them here in Chicago. I’m a part of a big success story, magical in every way, and the Hs are such good people.

  It’s just not fair that this awful mood’s come over them both. The morning papers were full of this awful business they’re calling The Magician Murders. Two old-time stage illusionists dead so far. Mr H knew them both a long time back; old duffers, he called them. And he says he’s not worried, that he’ll stay safe.

  Now another old friend of his has showed. The Doctor. He looks like he might be a magician too.

  And he looks the exact opposite of safe.

  ‘The Magician Murders!’ The Doctor threw back his latest head and laughed, the roar echoing off the dark tenements along the Chicago River. ‘You’ll be safe then, Harry. You’re not a magician, you’re a Supreme Ruler of Mystery– wasn’t that what you used to put on the playbills?’

  Houdini glared across at his old friend, and quickly regretted it. No one could out-stare the Doctor while he wore this form: a mighty voltage blazed in those stone-hard eyes, locked beneath the Victorian preacher brows. This Doctor’s soul matched his dress: austere and dark but with rich flashes of colour, a right companion with whom to venture into cold and moonlit danger.

  ‘The first man to die,’ said Houdini, ‘was Dean Kellar, “The Dean D’Illusion”.’

  ‘Terrible title.’

  ‘Terrible act,’ Houdini snorted. ‘Or used to be. These past few years his Third Eye trick has drawn bill-topping business.’

  ‘And so perhaps marked him out for murder along with …’ The Doctor consulted the Tribune’s front page article. ‘The Miracle-Monger, Gregor Yarinski?’

  ‘Yarinski was a relic until he spruced up his act with a bulletproof cage—’

  ‘Miracle-Monger?’ The Doctor looked nauseated. ‘All right, all right, so what am I doing here – your bodyguard?’

  ‘I have not asked for your assistance because I fear attack.’

  ‘Why, then?’ The Doctor’s grey hair was ruffled in the wind blowing in across the river. ‘Why come to the scene of the latest crime on your one night off in weeks?’

  Houdini hesitated. Then he nodded ahead to a large, shadowy redbrick edifice beside the rotting docks, far from the nearest streetlamps. ‘Gladstone insists I was seen at his lock-up around the time Yarinski’s murder took place. He threatens to go to the press.’

  ‘But you weren’t there?’

  ‘Naturally not.’

  ‘Then why accuse you?’

  ‘Envy? Resentment?’ Houdini spoke carefully; the Doctor was as good at scenting lies as selling them, they had that much in common. ‘Like the Dean and Yarinski, Gladstone is an elder of the Magicians’ Innermost Circle, and a spiritualist medium to boot. Such charlatans do not enjoy the way I expose their tricks and hokum.’