Houdini’s Last Illusion
By Steven Savile
Published by BadPress at Smashwords
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Copyright © 2011 Steven Savile
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Detroit, Michigan: October 25th 1926
The magician stared at the mismatched pair of gloves in his hands.
The left glove was white silk, while the right was made of black leather.
Closing his eyes, he offered a prayer to a God he had long since stopped believing in, and held the black glove to his lips. Exhaling slowly, the magician filled the glove, his breath giving it a miraculous life of its own. His first breath conjured the faintest outline of feathers in the soft leather, the second gave them definition, shape and form, whilst the third stretched out the tip of the thumb until it formed a hard beak. Again and again the magician breathed into the glove, inflating it with the spark of life until the soft leather had changed forever into the flesh of a living, breathing, black bird.
“There’s only so much life a man can give up.” The magician said, setting the black bird down on a small wooden perch. He raised the white glove to his lips and breathed the merest sliver of his soul into it, shaping the silk into the delicate body of a flawless white dove. He set the dove down beside the black bird. The bird ruffled its feathers and craned its neck as though considering the magician. He returned the bird’s stare, then spoke quietly, as though fearing being overhead.
“Find them for me. Find the ones who hunt me, let them be the hunted for a while. Bring me back their faces so that I might know who they are.”
He walked to the window and drew back the sash, letting in the October night and letting out the birds. The magician stood at the window watching the birds fly away over the grey slate roofs until they were nothing more than smudges in the sky. His hands were shaking. The sheer mental and physical exhaustion of dividing his soul in three like that, then setting the parts free, would have killed a weaker man.
Across the street a poster advertised that The Great Houdini would be performing feats of magic and illusion at the Garrick Theatre on October 26th.
The magician was bone tired.
Behind him the dressing room door opened. Soft footsteps, the familiar scent of vanilla musk. Bess. His Bess. Like an angel she always knew when he needed her strength, and like an angel she knew how to share it with him.
“Come to bed, Harry.” Bess said, resting a hand on his shoulder.
“They make me look ridiculous,” he said as if he hadn’t heard her. “All of the posturing and posing, flexing my muscles as if I am trying to break the damned chains in two. What a disappointment I must be in the flesh, The Great Houdini.”
“Don’t be maudlin. Close the window, darling. It’s getting cold in here.”
“I’m going to stop soon. Perhaps at the end of this tour. Give the gimmicks to Hardeen and just enjoy what’s left of my life. My greatest performance, one final disappearing act.”
“Of course you are dear.” Bess said gently. She had heard the words before. More times than she cared to remember. Harry was the boy who cried wolf, one day he would retire and the world wouldn’t believe him. They would be lining up to buy tickets for a tour that would never happen. His ever loving public, always demanding more from their idol.
“All the world isn’t a stage. I could simply fade away. They would forget me soon enough.”
“Ah, but you wouldn’t forget them though would you, Harry? The show is in your blood.”
“No,” the magician admitted, closing the window.
“Are you coming to bed then, dear?”
“Not for a while yet. I thought I might go for a walk. You know it has been over twenty years since I visited Detroit. I imagine a lot has changed. I know I have.” The magician said. “Besides, Ana Eva Fay is holding a séance. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her, and you know, perhaps this is the last time I shall be able to. It might be nice, for old times sake, to come full circle.”
“Oh, Harry. You set yourself up to be hurt even though you know they are all charlatans and fakers. They see you coming. It’s a game they play now, who can fool the Great Houdini.”
“Not all of them,” Harry Houdini whispered, looking at the poster across the street. Whether it was a trick of the failing light or not, the illusion was perfect: the black and white face met his gaze and winked at him.
It was raining; a fine light rain.
The magician walked with his head down and the collar of his great coat turned up against the drizzle. He crossed the Belle Isle Bridge. On his last visit to the city he had thrown himself from this very bridge. It was an old trick. He freed himself from the handcuffs underwater and swam to a waiting boat. Its death defying nature made a good story though. And that was what it was all about, after all: the illusion.
Anna Eva Fay’s rented rooms were on Shaftsbury Avenue, over on the far side of the city but rather than take a handsome cab Harry felt like walking. The air and the rain would help clear his head. The moon was a bright ball of silver in the night sky.
The gaslights burned yellow-blue on the street corners. Five blocks from the theatre Harry sensed – rather than saw – that he was being followed. Discipline learned from years under the stagelights kept him from looking over his shoulder. Instead, without missing a step, he listened for the telltale second set of footsteps moving ever so slightly out of time with his own. They were there but there was something wrong about them; something irregular. It took him a moment, but then Harry realized that his pursuer must have had some kind of deformity that had left him with a limp.
Knowing the streets gave him an advantage, and as that old bloodhound, Damon Runyon, was so fond of saying: it was just as easy to follow someone from in front as it was from behind, once you knew they were there.
He let his eyes do the work whilst he walked without hurrying. Half a block away he saw the entrance to a poorly lit alleyway. It was perfect for what he had in mind. Harry ducked into the alleyway. Where someone else might have pressed themselves into one of the shadowy recesses of a doorway, the magician took a moment to scan the alley for possibilities, then looked upwards for inspiration. The trailing rungs of a rusted fire escape dangled just out of reach. The logic of it appealed to him. His pursuer wouldn’t expect to lose his quarry upwards; he’d be looking left and right for doorways or windows Houdini might have somehow wriggled through. Grinning, Harry crouched, tensed, and then jumped, snagging the bottom rung with his fingers. He pulled himself up just in time.
A giant of a man stepped into the mouth of the alley. Beneath his great coat his entire body was twisted up like the curl of a corkscrew. It was as though the man’s body had fought the unnatural growth every inch of the way. The twist of his spine had dropped one side of his pelvis, forcing his left leg to drag on the ground. There wasn’t a hair on his shaved head. The effect was both monstrous and yet strangely familiar.
Vautrinot, Houdini recognized the Polish magician but it made no sense. Vautrinot had been a pioneer. Technically flawless, his tricks were no mere slight of hand. Vautrinot had manipulated mechanics and misdirection equally well to offset his deformity and create the perfect illusions. Tricks within tricks. He had been a magician’s magician, far more than a mere vaudevillian prestidigitator, Vautrinot had crafted his own illusions.
But the emphasis on all of the Pole’s achievements lay on the word had.
Vautrinot was dead.
He had died on stage in Paris just before the turn of the century. Peritonitis, some kind of final fit had left the twisted giant lying centre stage with five white doves flying around his head, props escaped from his last illusion.
And now he was here, twenty-eight years later and half a world away, stalking Harry Houdini through the streets of Detroit.
Vautrinot shuffled beneath Harry’s hiding place, taking his time and methodically checking each darkened doorway for the magician. Houdini waited for Vautrinot to reach the crossroads at the far end of the alley then lowered himself to the ground. He landed soundlessly. With the switch complete, the hunter was now very much the hunted. Houdini moved soundlessly up behind Vautrinot and rested a hand on his shoulder.
“Looking for someone, my friend?” Houdini said.
The twisted giant turned. There was no hint of surprise on his face. He coughed, his lungs full of phlegm.
“A warning for you is all. Only fair.” Vautrinot said in his broken English. His voice sounded as if it hadn’t been used in a long time. “They’re coming to take you home, Magician. They haven’t forgotten you or what you did…”
Harry looked at the man who had once been his friend. “Is that why you are following me? To deliver a meaningless threat from beyond the grave? Why not merely a voice at a séance? A ghost rattling chains at my bedside?”
“Because you are one of us, Magician. And because so much of your life is a lie.” Even as he said this the giant’s face began to melt. Like wax too close to a naked flame the skin across Vautrinot’s brow, nose and cheekbones began to slide and sink, losing all substance, blinding the dead man’s his eyes and filling his open mouth with flesh.
Houdini stood rooted to the spot, hypnotized by the giant’s ruined face, revolted and perversely compelled to stare until Vautrinot’s jaw stretched, as though the dead magician was trying desperately to scream through his sealed mouth. Then he ran and he didn’t look back to see if Vautrinot was chasing him.
My mind is the key that sets me free.
He’d said that to a journalist in Hanover nearly thirty years ago, a glib one-liner that was meant to suggest that Harry Houdini was a rational man driven by an analytical mind that was equally capable of solving the most obtuse riddles and mysteries of the physical world as it was of creating illusions and deceiving the naked eye with tricks that defied explanation. The line had been offered back to him a thousand times over.
Doubled over, hands on knees and breathing hard, Harry desperately wanted some part of that rational logical mind of his to explain away the dead Vautrinot with his melting face.
“Stress,” he said aloud, the excuse sounding hollow.
It was more than stress. It went back further, delved deeper into the core of who and what he was.
“My mind is the key that sets me free,” he said to his reflection in the glass panels of the clairvoyant’s door. Steeling himself, Harry checked to see if he had been followed. The street was deserted. He took first one, and then a second, deep breath and rapped on the door with its ornate brass lion headed knocker.
The door was opened by Ana’s housekeeper, Helga, an Austrian immigrant who had never quite managed to lose the Germanic overtones to her accent.
“Herr Houdini, be welcomed. The Madam and her guests are in the sitting room.” She didn’t seem even remotely surprised by the magician‘s appearance on her doorstep after all these years.
The reception was decorated in lavish reds and greens with thick velvet drapes and sumptuous cushions with golden brocade. Portraits of Ana Eva and her late husband Viktor hung over a walnut bureau, the oils making the faces appear both more intense and menacing than their real life models had ever been. Viktor had been a carpenter, a craftsman who loved looking for the miracles in each and every piece of wood he worked with, seeking out the shapes and the spirits that lived within them. Every piece of furniture in Ana’s house had been lovingly and painstakingly carved by her husband, right down to his last piece, a solitary chess piece from a set he had designed in his early teens, a bishop, that had taken the man three months to shape as his hands had been brutally mutated by arthritis into claws barely able to hold his scrimshaw blade.
Harry removed his coat and gave it to Helga to hang in the cloakroom. He went through to join Ana Eva and her other guests.
The first thing he noticed was the smell: sandalwood.
Like the rest of the house, the sitting room was dominated by regency colors and various shades of wood. Thick scarlet drapes closed off the archway that led to the dining room. Chinese and Egyptian urns housed enormous flowering shrubs and miniature trees whose barks went from almost pitch to the palest silver birch. Ornate rosewood bookcases – with bookends shaped into their shelves – filled the longest wall, each bookend modeled on a figure from Grimm’s fairy tales, each one labelled in Viktor’s elaborate script in the original Germanic form: there was Der Froschkönig and Die Gänsemagd, Dornröschen and Aschenputtel. The Frog King and The Goose Girl, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. The sadness of the detail captured in each figure was exquisite and painful to behold.
The guests were in conversation. Harry recognized a few of them from the society pages. Wrapped in sequins and pearls Judith Welles stirred a martini with her finger. The bright colors of her clothes were a vivid contrast to her eyes. Welles had married into the new money of the automobile industry. Her husband, Garfield Welles, had died of wasting sickness less than two months ago and no amount of that new money could save him. She was obviously hoping to hear that her dear departed was alive and well and living on Saint’s Avenue, Heaven. Judith Welles would be receptive to suggestion and willing to believe any so called miracle. In other words she was an easy mark. Jericho Joe Dorsey was hanging off her every word, his thick neck craned down bullishly. There wasn’t enough cotton in his white shirt to contain the heavyweight’s muscles. Jericho Joe was the latest greatest white hope in the heavyweight arena, Detroit’s golden boy with equally golden gloves. In the summer he’d left Luis Angel Firpo out cold on the canvas in the second, and the rumor on Runyon’s sports page was that Jericho Joe was slated to box either Gene Tunney or Jack Dempsey for their belt after Christmas.
Next to Jericho Joe and the grieving Automobile Heiress, Dr. Oberon Mietelowski was deep in conversation with the Black Widow. The Black Widow simply laughed and blew smoke.
“Like I care, darling.” She said around the tip of her cigarette, though Harry noticed, she pronounced the word dah-link.
This odd couple were both regulars in the broadsheets. Thin faced and sallow-eyed with a neatly trimmed goatee and bifocals balanced on the end of his nose, Oberon Mietelowski was every inch the macabre Dr. Death they painted him. His reputation had been earned over the last few years with wild claims about dead bodies being the ultimate evidence in murder crimes. The study of pathology, he called it. Letting the victim tell the story of their murder. The broadsheets, of course, turned his theories inside out with even wilder claims that the murderer’s face might be burned into the backs of the victim’s eyes as the last thing they ever saw, and all that Dr. Death needed to do was open the eyes and see. Mietolowski’s ideas that somehow saliva, semen or other secretions might one day be as distinguishable as fingerprints and scars had become something of a joke but he kept on with them nevertheless, positive that they were the key.
“Ah, Mr. Houdini, do join us won’t you?” Mietelowski offered, seeing Harry standing on the fringe of things. “I was just explaining to Elspeth here that in some parts of Europe lighting your cigarette from a naked flame is considered bad form. They believe it dooms some poor sailor to a watery grave.”
“Sounds positively ghoulish,” the Black Widow said with a smile. “I like that.”
The Black Widow’s real name was Elspeth Neville. Widowed five times, her fortunes had steadily increased since the death of her first husband nine years earlier in a bizarre boating accident. Ms. Neville had subsequently found, married and survived four captains of industry in six short years. Other guests mingled and talked, moving like bees from one flower to the next as they drained one and others nectar. A prominent politician shook hands warmly with one of the city’s most notorious speakeasy owners. That explains the martini, Harry thought, turning his attention back to Dr. Death and the Black Widow.