Saving Houdini

  SAVING HOUDINI

  MICHAEL REDHILL

  Dedication

  For Benjamin and Maxime, brothers

  Epigraph

  There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.

  — THOMAS AQUINAS

  The Globe and Mail

  ADVERTISEMENT

  Monday, September 5, 2011

  THAT GREAT MYSTIFIER

  BLOOM THE BEGUILER

  Begs the attention of his fellow

  Torontonians

  As the abovementioned

  ENTERTAINER

  — he of the nation’s

  greatest magical family —

  WILL MAKE HIS REGULAR

  QUINQUENNIAL TORONTO APPEARANCE

  THIS OCTOBER 31, 2011

  AT THE CANON THEATRE 8PM, SHARP

  WHEREIN HE WILL MARK

  THE 85TH ANNIVERSARY OF

  HARRY HOUDINI’S DEATH

  The Globe and Mail

  ADVERTISEMENT

  Monday, September 5, 2011

  SEE:

  PRODIGIOUS PRESTIDIGITATION

  STARTLING SESQUIPEDALIANISM

  INSTANCES OF THE INEXPLICABLE

  ALSO:

  FOR ONLY THE SECOND TIME IN NINE DECADES

  THE SOAP

  BUBBLE VANISH

  This famed effect created by the magician’s grandfather

  WILL BE PERFORMED

  ONE OF THE GREATEST

  MAGIC TRICKS EVER

  ONE NIGHT ONLY!

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Praise for Michael Redhill

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Not me, not me, not me—

  Dashiel Frederic Woolf sat completely still. He didn’t look up but he knew they were near. They were coming. Closer and closer. His breath came jagged; his hands clenched into fists in his lap. There was a straining in the air, like a high note.

  Not me, not me. Like a chant in his head. He couldn’t help himself: he looked up. And someone was standing right beside him. A woman. She wore a satiny black and red dress. And she was pointing directly at him. The Alluring Katie. Just fifteen minutes ago, she’d been sawn in half. Too bad they’d put her back together.

  “I think she means you, sweetheart,” his mother said.

  “I didn’t put my hand up!” he growled at his mother. “I’m not going onstage!”

  The audience was enthusiastic—three thousand people clapping in unison. “I think they want you to get up, Dash,” his dad said. “You’ll be great!”

  “I’m gonna barf!”

  “Well, make it spectacular, then,” he said. “Get the whole front row.”

  Dashiel Woolf stood up. The audience went mad. This is a nightmare, he thought.

  An hour earlier, he’d been stuffing wine gums into his mouth without a care in the world. He and his parents had been wandering around the lobby, watching the other theatregoers, reading the names on the signed photographs on the wall. Wine gums were kind of old-timey candies, but they lasted a long time and they came in all these colours. They were chewy too—but not too chewy—and the colours actually had different flavours. And unlike chocolate, they didn’t melt in your mouth right away. You had to work a wine gum.

  He’d been gnawing a purple one when a voice came over the sound system.

  “Three minutes to curtain.”

  He looked down at his palm. There were five wine gums left and his mum had told him not to take anything sticky into the theatre. She’d also chosen the supposedly “handsome” suit he was wearing. He felt like he was in one of those boring black and white movies.

  “Dash?” said his father with a horrified look on his face. “How many of those did you just put in your mouth?”

  “Fwoo?” He’d jammed four of the remaining wine gums in.

  “I don’t even know why you like those things. They’re not authentic, you know.”

  “Come on, we’re going in,” said his mother.

  Thank god. His father was about to make a speech about how much better things had been in the past.

  The second half of the show was going to be even awesomer than the first. And Bloom was going to do the Soap Bubble Vanish as a big finale. Dash tucked three of the wine gums behind his back teeth.

  “They’re more like gummy bears,” his father was saying as they went down the aisle to their seats. “The original Maynards wine gums are sort of leathery. More like jerky than candy. There’s a dusty feeling when you put them in your mouth.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dash said, his voice hollowed out by a cheekful of candy.

  “You look like a squirrel,” said his father.

  “You look old.”

  “You smell funny,” said his father, grinning.

  The lights were flashing and everyone moved into their seats. A round, white spot hung in the middle of the red curtain, like a full moon. His mum draped her arm over his shoulder.

  “In a year’s time,” she whispered into his ear, “you’re going to be a teenager and I’m not going to have to lean over to put my arm around you.”

  Each time the magician Joseph Bloom was scheduled to come back to Toronto, tickets would go on sale a year in advance and sell out in less than ten minutes. He toured the world with his show, but he made a point of returning once every five years to his hometown. He’d always do something special for his quinquennial. “Something to keep you another five years,” he’d always say. Somehow, last year, Dash’s mother had snagged four tickets.

  The fourth ticket had been for Dash’s best friend Alex, but Alex had moved away in the summer to Holland. Dash hadn’t even known where Holland was, never mind that there was a town in it called Leiden. His mum kept bugging him to invite someone else, but what would have been the point? Alex was gone now, and it was Alex’s ticket and no one was going to replace him. They were good tickets too: right on the aisle. Too bad for Alex. He could have stayed in Toronto with his dad instead of moving away with his mum, could have kept going to the same school, and then he’d be here now, in the third row, for the most famous magic trick on the planet.

  His loss.

  Dash had insisted that the aisle seat be left empty.

  He and his parents moved into their own seats just as the auditorium lights faded. He watched the audience settle around him. He finally chewed the purple wine gum. That’s how grapes should taste, he thought.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” bugled a voice, as the moon on the curtain lost the last of its lustre. “Please welcome back to the Canon Theatre stage … Joseph Bloom: Bloom the Beguiler!”

  In the olden days, there had been the great Hs like Houdini and Howard Thurston, but to Dash, the Bs had always been the Best. B for Bloom. The beguiling Bloom. And B was also for Bloom the Incomparable—the Beguiler’s father, who had once eaten a pincushion full of needles and then pulled them out of his mouth with a magnet. And then there was Blumenthal the Believer, Bloom’s grandfather. They were one of the most famous magic families of all time,
and Bloom still did some of his grandfather’s tricks. Blumenthal’s signature opening had been to produce a rose from the inside of an empty fist. It would grow out of his hand, thorns and all, to a foot in height.

  It had been the grandfather who’d invented the Soap Bubble Vanish. He’d only performed it once, in 1926, and although the trick had made him briefly famous, he retired it, and afterward, according to legend, he wouldn’t speak of it. When he passed away, the secret died with him, and the apparatus was lost.

  But somehow, Bloom was doing it tonight. How the trick had come into his possession was a mystery. He would only say that he was doing it in honour of his grandfather and to mark the death of Harry Houdini, who had died on Halloween eighty-five years ago this very evening.

  Dash watched the second half of the show in a sort of blissed-out trance. Bloom performed The Flying Fish—a terrifying escape. Then a rope trick in which a small length of rope was stretched and thickened until it reached across the stage. Then The Living Marionette, a classic invented by Bloom’s father, and She’s Beside Herself, in which the Alluring Katie was separated—while standing upright—into two pieces, with the doors to the boxes open the entire time. After a trick with shadows and swords, the stage went dark, and a sharp circle of light appeared on the back wall.

  A steel ring rolled out all by itself from the wings and spun to a stop in the middle of the stage.

  It was time for the grand finale.

  Bloom walked slowly, regally, to the middle of the stage and stood there before them with a little metal wand in his hand. He had changed into a plain grey suit with a silver tie. He picked the ring off the stage and tinged all around the inside of it with the metal wand, and the sound of the steel chimed out over them all.

  “The circle of life,” he began now, holding the ring out to the audience. Flat on, it looked like a washer the size of a manhole. There was a groove in its surface that made a perfect circle within the ring. “This greatest mystery of all. How we get here, where we go. What life is, what forces govern it. I would like to demonstrate to you how deep a mystery it really is. I must warn you, though: this trick is not for the faint-hearted. I save it for last because I suspect you will need time to recover. But in order to do it, I’m going to need a volunteer for … the Soap Bubble Vanish.”

  A forest of hands shot upwards in the auditorium and instantly the room was acrackle with energy. Dash, his heart pounding, kept his hands tightly in his lap. He was going to be one of only a handful of people ever to see this trick performed. And he had a third-row seat!

  The lights came up, and Bloom’s three assistants began walking the aisles on either side, looking left and right, searching for a volunteer.

  2

  The Alluring Katie held her hand out to him.

  He had no choice. He groaned under his breath and rose, and the applause thickened. Then he was in the aisle and walking to the stage.

  Katie helped Dash up the steps to where Bloom was standing. Bloom the Beguiler. In person.

  “You look like you’re being marched to your execution,” Bloom said, and the audience laughed.

  Dash wiped the cold sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. His heart was breakdancing.

  “What is your name, young man?”

  “Dashiel,” he muttered.

  “What is that?”

  “DASHIEL,” he said louder, and he heard his voice thrown around the auditorium.

  “Well, young man, tell me …” Bloom paused, admiring his volunteer. “Have we met before?”

  “Only in a couple of books I’ve read.”

  “Oh, so you know about me? You know what I can do …” Bloom lifted the ring and looked at Dash through it. Now the audience’s laughter turned nervous. “Are you not a little worried?”

  “I’m very worried,” Dash said.

  The magician turned to the audience looking like he was holding back a laugh. “I see our young friend has done his homework! I assure you, Master Dash, you have no reason to worry. But then again, worry is not a rational thing, is it? Magic is irrational. Maybe you should be worried!” He looked out at the audience again and gave them a clownish wink. They roared with laughter. “I can always ask someone else to come up here …”

  “No,” said Dash. He wasn’t going to chicken out in front of thousands of people. “I’ll do it.”

  Bloom clapped him on the shoulder and squeezed. “Brilliant! Now, let’s have a look at you.” He pretended to dust Dash off. “Are you going to be vanished with your tie all a mess like that?”

  “I …”

  “Now, now,” Bloom said, “let’s look our best for the people. Will someone please fix this poor boy’s tie?”

  He gently urged Dash toward the wings, and Dash walked off in a daze, blinded by the light. A flutter of laughter came his way. He could taste lime wine gum at the back of his throat. In the darkness of the wings, a pair of hands reached out to him and began fiddling with his tie.

  “There’s a chalk ring on the stage,” a boy’s voice whispered. “Put the steel ring on it, okay? Or you might get bonked with something.”

  Dash’s eyes began to adjust and he saw a kid about his age standing in front of him. The boy had a muss of black hair on his head and no clue how to fix a tie. The footlights picked out his blue eyes.

  “Your name’s Dash?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, someone left this for you,” the boy said, and he slid a small, white envelope into Dash’s breast pocket. Then, before Dash had a chance to say anything, the boy shoved him back onstage.

  “Oh,” said Bloom, seeing the state of his tie now. “We’ll have to fire the wardrobe people, I guess!” Dash glanced back into the wings, but the kid was gone. “Young man,” said Bloom, “will you take this ring from me and place it somewhere on the stage? Anywhere you like.”

  Dash took the ring. It wasn’t very heavy, but it was solid. He walked back a few steps. There was a faint chalk circle exactly the circumference of the ring, just as the boy had said. Dash pretended to hesitate, looking around, and Bloom watched him, a tiny flicker of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. Then Dash put the ring down exactly on its mark.

  “Now, if you will, take your position inside that iron ring.” Dash stepped into it carefully. “Anything unusual?”

  “Um, everything?”

  The audience laughed.

  “Stomp on the floor there. Solid, isn’t it? No trap door?” Dash shook his head. “And now open your arms to show there are no unseen wires anywhere around you.”

  Dash spread his arms wide and turned in a slow circle. The room revolved in front of him: the audience, the theatre boxes along the wall ranging upwards like steps. Then the bare backstage, the light intensifying on it. Bloom … and all those spectators’ eyes.

  “Let us continue,” Bloom said. He gestured into the fly space above and something began to move downwards. A second ring appeared, lowering on cables. It seemed heavier than the first, and Bloom guided it so it didn’t hit Dash on the head as it passed around his body to the floor. The upper ring made a smart clacking noise as it came into contact with the lower.

  “Are you ready?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you know what is going to happen, young Dashiel?”

  “No …”

  “Do you want to hear the truth?” Bloom leaned in and whispered, loudly enough for the audience to hear, “I don’t either! But … that is no reason not to find out!”

  He stepped back, lifting his hands. The cables began to draw the ring back up over Dash’s body. As they did, a luminous, undulating film rose with the ring. When the film reached the level of his chest, Dash could smell it: it was acrid and soapy. Something in the smell settled his stomach a little, and as the chill of the bubble cooled his face and chest, he felt a calm envelop him. Finally, the ring passed over his head and Dash was looking at the audience through a wavering, impossibly thin, slightly blue screen. It made the fac
es in front of him sway and shrink and bulge. There were his parents, sitting in the third row, giving him a thumbs-up. Dorks.

  And then he was feeling oddly sleepy … He watched Bloom approach him with a long, polished needle in his hand. The light was bursting everywhere. He listened to Bloom’s voice:

  “The line that divides life from death is as thin as the bubble that encases young Dashiel tonight. But only in magic can you vanish and … COME BACK!”

  The tip of Bloom’s pin touched the soapy membrane of the bubble and colour rushed toward it like something flowing into a hole. The lights were strange and slow, and Dash saw his parents’ faces moving away from him. The balcony at the back of the house, a dirty colour now in the shifting light, was spreading wide and thin like taffy. Then it was like he’d just taken off on an airplane and a great rushing sound filled his ears. There was a sudden, hollow pop, so big he felt it in his bones.

  Then there was nothing. Emptiness above him and below him. He was floating in silence. At some point he had closed his eyes. He felt he could be rising, but then he was falling, slowly, and the stage floor came up to meet his feet. He could hear himself breathing in the hollow silence. It was really quiet.

  Too quiet.

  He opened his right eye half a squint. Through his lashes, he saw seats in the theatre. But they were empty. Rows and rows of empty seats.

  He closed the eye. Okay. Yep. That’s not right.

  Maybe there was another theatre in the basement of the Canon. Or he’d spun around a hidden wall into another auditorium. Except he was pretty sure there was only one in this theatre. And this one was identical in every way to the one he’d been watching the show in. It also looked …

  Newer.

  He opened both eyes. It was the same place, all right, but Bloom, his assistants, the audience, and even the ring he had been standing in were gone.

  Dash leaned over and barfed.