Shirman Brown

Hillman “Hilly” Brown is a ten-year-old amateur magician whose homemade disappearing device turns a bid for his father’s admiration into a crisis when his younger brother David vanishes beneath the makeshift stage and fails to reappear. His episode makes a child’s inventive ambition both startlingly capable and dangerously literal: the trick works, but the family audience cannot respond to it as entertainment, and Hilly is left alone with the consequences.

Identity and Background

Hilly’s given name came from his mother Marie’s maiden name, preserved with the agreement of his father, Bryant. The family soon called him Hilly, and the name followed a boy whom his grandfather Ev described as having catlike nerves. From infancy he was unusually anxious: he rocked in his crib while crying, sucked both thumbs, and had painful blisters on them by eight months old. The novel presents this nervousness as an enduring feature of family life rather than a passing childhood phase.

By ten, Hilly had taken up amateur magic, but before the events of his most consequential performance he had never managed a truly spectacular trick. That lack of success matters because his later invention is not simply another practiced illusion. It is a sharp break in his experience, and its suddenness coincides with the wider disturbance affecting Haven.

A Sudden Return to Magic

Hilly’s renewed interest in magic arrived around the time the picture of Jesus began speaking to ’Becka Paulson. A powerful idea took hold of him: rather than rely on familiar mechanical tricks such as Multiplying Coins, he would invent mechanical effects of his own, on a scale that could surpass the clockwork tricks of Thurston or the hinged mirrors of Blackstone. He had recently begun to feel capable of making such things.

The change marks a turn from an inexperienced boy trying to reproduce established tricks to an inventor determined to make an audience gasp. His aim remained personal as well as theatrical. During the performance, he watched his father shifting as if ready to leave, and the prospect distressed him because impressing Bryant mattered more to him than impressing anyone else. Yet the more extraordinary the magic became, the more painfully it failed to produce the response Hilly wanted.

The Disappearing Device

At the center of Hilly’s orange-crate stage stood a second crate covered by a sheet. Inside it he had assembled his invention from batteries David had seen in Hilly’s room and the working parts of an old Texas Instruments calculator, stolen from the bottom of Marie’s desk. Another of Hilly’s unusual thefts supplied the control: he hid the foot pedal of his mother’s sewing machine in the folds of the sheet and connected it to the device with spring connectors Marie had bought him in Augusta.

The machine made objects disappear and then brought them back. To Hilly, that was a mind-boggling effect; to the audience, it was not the triumph he imagined. His father was preparing to leave, and Hilly could see that the performance was boring the people watching. The device’s power therefore became conspicuous in the gap between what it could do and what an audience could understand or enjoy. Hilly had built a working apparatus, but its success as a mechanism did not amount to success as a performance.

David as the Grand Finale

Panicked by the audience’s reaction, Hilly abandoned the remaining planned effects: a disappearing bookcase, his mother’s exercise cycle, and his father’s motorcycle. He went directly to the finale he had named the Disappearing Little Brother. Bryant began to interrupt him, but the performance proceeded into a disappearance that no longer resembled a harmless stage illusion.

David had already encountered an unaccustomed hardness in his brother. Earlier, Hilly had slammed the door in his face; David, unable to get back in, went downstairs, turned on the television, and cried himself to sleep in front of Sesame Street. The abrupt change in Hilly’s usually sweet-natured behavior foreshadows the distance between the brothers at the magic show: David becomes the chosen subject of Hilly’s effect just when Hilly is most desperate to salvage the performance.

After David disappeared, Hilly’s grandfather Ev was the only person at the second gala magic show whose mind remained fully clear. Confused by what had happened, Ev did not get down on his arthritic knees to look beneath the stage. He withdrew, partly because he feared his birthday gift had contributed to Hilly’s distress, and decided to return when the boy had regained control of himself. His departure left Hilly without the adult intervention that might have tested the trick immediately.

Guilt and the Unfinished Trick

Watching Ev shuffle away, Hilly felt his guilt and misery double and then treble. Once his grandfather had gone, he got to his feet, returned to the platform, and pressed the concealed sewing-machine pedal. The familiar mechanism was still there, waiting for the sheet to rise in David’s shape. Hilly meant to pull it away and prove that David was beneath it after all; in his imagination, he might even swat his brother for having frightened him, or perhaps do something gentler.

The pedal and the sheet, once concealed parts of a clever act, become the objects around which Hilly’s desperate expectation gathers. His actions repeat the operation of the trick, but this time the intended payoff is not applause: he needs the machine to restore his brother and undo what he has done. The evidence leaves that attempted return suspended at the moment of activation, with the device humming and Hilly waiting for the sheet to take David’s shape.

Narrative Significance

Hilly’s episode binds the town’s uncanny transformation to familiar domestic materials: a sewing-machine pedal, an obsolete calculator, batteries, spring connectors, and orange crates. The contraption is neither an abstract supernatural marvel nor merely a magician’s prop. Its specific construction makes Hilly’s invention tangible, while its use on David turns ordinary household ingenuity into a source of alarm.

The performance also concentrates Hilly’s vulnerability in a clear reversal. He begins with an urgent wish to impress his father and an ambitious conviction that invention can make him spectacular; when his audience remains unmoved, he escalates to the disappearance of his brother. The trick succeeds in the most frightening sense and fails in every human one. Hilly’s final attempt to activate it again shows a child trying to recover both David and the meaning of his own invention, with no reassurance yet that either can be brought back.