Saving Houdini Read online

  3

  “HEY!” came an angry voice.

  Dash stood fixed to his spot, rib cage shuddering with fear.

  “Hey!” shouted the voice. “Whadya think you’re doin’ up there? How didya get in here anyhow?”

  A man wearing a tight black suit and a messy black beard came down the aisle. He didn’t look at all friendly. “You kids coming in here at night these days? Is that what this is? Eh? You kids squeakin’ in through the fence in the parkin’ lot?”

  “I don’t know what you mean—”

  The man climbed the stairs at the side of the stage, waggling a long flashlight. He shone its hard, white light into Dash’s eyes.

  “EH! Whadya do to my stage! You know what one a’ these feels like on the backa yer leg?”

  “My parents were just here, sir. I, I was—”

  “MARCH! Get your person offa my stage before I leave an imprint on it! By which I mean your PERSON.” He slapped the barrel of the flashlight against his palm.

  Dash found his legs and backed away to the edge of the stage. No adult had ever threatened to hit him. Some other kids, maybe, but not adults, and this guy was for real. Dash jumped down from the front of the stage and turned around.

  “Does your boss know you threaten kids?”

  The man’s face went white with rage. He started clomping down the stairs after Dash. “My boss? You wanna talk to my boss? You’re talkin’ to’m right now!”

  What in the world was going on? Where were his parents? How did they get everyone out of the theatre so quickly? Dash ran up the aisle to the doors and pushed through them into the lobby—

  And stopped in his tracks.

  It was different out here. Totally different. The carpeting had changed colour from red to blue, and the concession stand was now on the right. Had he come out another door? He speed-walked over to the candy counter. There was a pack of Maynards under the glass, but it was packaged differently. And beside the wine gums was a package of candy called Adams Black Jack Sucking Candy. He hadn’t seen that during the intermission. Nor had there been any Fox’s Glacier Mints—”In a BOTTLE,” it said on the label. Since when did they start putting mints into bottles?

  He was so stunned he could do nothing but turn and stare as the theatre owner came bounding into the lobby, the auditorium doors banging back against the walls.

  “Hold on! Just wait!” Dash said, his hands up. “Let me say something!”

  “You have two and a half seconds.”

  “Is this—?”

  “Time’s up!”

  “Wait! Hold on! Is this the Canon Theatre?”

  “What cannon theatre?” the man snarled.

  Dash backed up quickly through the concourse. The doors to the street were still a floor down. He made a run for it, taking the marble steps two at a time. He heard the echo of his pounding footfalls along the tiled hall as he raced to the exits. He rattled a door: locked. He tried the rest of them quickly in succession. Locked. Locked. Locked.

  On the other side of the glass, it was peacefully snowing. Dash stared. Something was very wrong with that scene.

  He heard the man’s slow, confident step behind him. Dash turned and pressed his back against the doors. The man waggled a ring of keys at him as he crossed in front of Dash and opened a steel case on the wall: a telephone box. He smiled with malicious triumph as he dialled a number. Then, he hung up and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Shouldn’t be long now,” he said. He stared at Dash, enjoying his triumph. The door was cold against his back. Where were his parents? How was he going to get out of this?

  The corners of the man’s mouth twitched upwards and he raised his hand toward the doors. “Ah, they’re always around when you need them.”

  Dash spun to see a pair of men with huge, fake-looking moustaches approaching the theatre.

  The theatre owner grabbed his jacket collar and held Dash tightly against one glass door as he unlocked the other.

  “Good evening, Officers,” he said.

  Those were police?

  “Good evening,” they replied as one.

  “I think we have an escapee from the orphanage.”

  Dash was pinned inside the circle of men. They smelled like gasoline and leather. His eyes searched between them, frantic, hunting for a way out.

  Beyond, in the street, he saw a big, black, cartoonish-looking car go trundling by. What the … “Where am I?” he yelled, pulling frantically in their clutches.

  “That won’t work on us,” replied one of the moustaches. “Which home are you from, boyo?”

  “Home? I’m from Toronto!”

  “Oh, rah-rah,” said the theatre owner. “He was making a mess on my stage!”

  “I didn’t mean to!”

  “Come on now,” said the other moustache.

  As the policeman’s hand stretched toward him, Dash felt a wave of energy flood his body and his heart began to race, like there was an engine behind his ribs. He pushed himself into one of the policemen and stomped on his foot, hard, hollering at the top of his lungs. The man instinctively shot back, shouting, and let go of Dash, and he made a pencil-dive between them, ramming the door open with his shoulder as he barrelled free. He landed on the sidewalk with a thud, and felt the heavy glass door already closing on his leg. There was no time to think—he bounded up and lurched into the road. Those cartoon cars were everywhere, with their square hoods and huge wheels with wooden spokes.

  He ran across the road, dodging the slow-moving vehicles. He heard whistles behind him rise in shrill discord.

  On the other side, where the Eaton Centre was supposed to be—where downtown was supposed to be!—there were houses. Instead of a sparkling mall half a kilometre long, festooned with video screens and bright billboards, there were little red-brick houses with wooden gables. A man stood in a window on the second floor of one of those houses, holding a cat in his arm and smoking a pipe.

  Dash crouched between a pair of parked cars stubbed up against the curb at an angle. Made it easier to hide, at least. He could hear angry voices nearby. He poked his head out and looked back at the theatre.

  It was the Canon Theatre. At least it was the same building with the same little gargoyles on the front. But the sign on top of the marquee said THE PANTAGES, and on either side were houses and stone buildings faced with columns. He ducked down again and spied through the wheel-spokes as black, gleaming boots went by. They really wanted to catch him, and do whatever people did to an eleven-year-old trespasser here. Wherever here was.

  He crouched between cars and tried to make himself as small as possible. No wonder Bloom’s grandfather had only done the trick once! Did Bloom know he was going to send Dash into this bizarro world? Was it possible this was how the trick worked? He’d read about the black arts, but he didn’t believe in wizards or sorcerers. This was just a magic trick! It had to be a trick!

  It had to be.

  He edged into traffic again, behind his pursuers. Almost all the cars had the word Ford stuck on their fronts in steel cursive. They weren’t like any Fords he’d ever seen: they moved in fits and starts, bunched up, and sometimes there’d be a parp-parp noise when someone honked their horn. He kept moving. Another noise added itself now to this unreal, too-real world, a deafening blare in the distance that bloomed into a hundred trumpets being blown through the wrong ends—a fire truck. He had to leap aside to avoid being crushed by its giant tires. Five firemen rode standing up in the back.

  “OI! You! Stop right there!”

  Dash dropped into another gear, running, his legs churning like he was riding his dad’s exercise bike on the hardest setting. The intersection in front of him was packed with people. Every last one of them, even the kids, was wearing a hat. He plunged into the crowd, his heart beating so hard it hurt. His lungs began to sting, his chest tightened. The air was freezing in his nose and mouth.

  Ahead of him, a streetcar ground on its tracks toward the intersection. It was a gre
y train with doors at the front and back and a bunch of wooden window frames along its side. There were a lot of people gathered around its back door. Dash swivelled toward the roadway again, but now there were two more policemen running for him, shrieking on their whistles. Oh god oh god oh god—he was going to get caught. He heard a voice behind him.

  “KID! Hey, kid!”

  A man at the rear of the crowd waiting for the streetcar was holding his hand out to him, gesturing furiously.

  “Come on! Hurry!”

  Dash ran toward him. His legs were going to give out. The man parted the jostling crowd with his hand as a load of passengers descended onto the sidewalk. They were met with a rush of newsboys who closed in behind Dash, blocking the men with the whistles. The newsboys cried something like Mailnempire! and Tyrannosaur, tyrannosaur, one penny! There were five of them, none older than fourteen, and more stood on crates by the storefronts. One was smoking a cigarette!

  “Hurry to the front there,” said the man, pushing him forward. Like everyone else he wore a hat—a plain, grey felt hat, like from the old movies his parents loved—but he had his brim pulled down low over his eyes. “Go on, then,” he said, and Dash whispered a hurried thank you as he passed him and jumped up into the streetcar.

  The doors rolled shut and the streetcar began moving. Dash watched through the window as the red-faced policemen blew their whistles in frustration. Above them, two giant wooden billboards loomed over the street, lit up with spotlights against the dusk. The snow came down into the middle of it all, a million white pinpoints against the glow, like stars falling into the street. The newsboys in their suspenders and flat, tartan caps had already rushed the doors of the next streetcar.

  Dash’s legs quaked. He looked down the aisle: he was standing among … well, strangely dressed people. People who looked like they were going home to their suppers. Some of them reading the newspapers they’d just bought. Three of the ladies were knitting. And everyone’s shoes looked so … old-fashioned. Even the new ones, the shiny ones, looked old.

  Maybe he had hit his head? That would explain it. Fat lot of good the backstage kid’s warning had been.

  This was impossible. Maybe he’d lost his mind. But he was certain he wasn’t dreaming, because you know the difference between real life and dreams when you’re in real life. It feels a certain way: the weight of your own feet on the ground, the pressure of something in your hand.

  And this all felt so real. The way the floor was bumping under his feet, the smell of cigarette smoke. (More than half the people on the car were puffing away.) But how?

  The streetcar was already slowing, and a few people rose from their seats. One of them was the man who’d parted the crowd for him.

  “Take my seat,” he said. “You look like you could use a rest.” He nodded kindly. He wore a dark, wool overcoat, and on its lapel there was a single, plain black ring like a brooch. No bigger than a ring you would wear on your finger. He stepped down and vanished into the shadows.

  Dash sat down as the streetcar lurched forward again. He watched the road stretch away through the glass at the front. Where was he going? East. Toward his part of town. The part he lived in. Maybe he’d just stay on the streetcar until he recognized something.

  Soon the streetlights of downtown were behind them. He turned and saw the intersection of Yonge and Dundas pulsing in the distance, an egg of light nested in a darkening sky. Dash realized he was sitting on a newspaper and he shifted to pluck it out. It was the Toronto Star (oh, he thought, tyrannasaur). He read the date.

  Then he read it again.

  Monday, October 18, 1926.

  The headline declared: HAIR CUT FROM HEAD OF “MISS X” WAS FALSE SAYS “HOAX WOMAN.”

  He stood up and slapped the newspaper down on the seat again. He sat on it. I’m going to freak out. Right now. Freak out on antique streetcar full of antique people and they’re gonna put me in handcuffs and dump me in an orphanage. He pursed his mouth and made little puffing breaths, and then he barked “HA HA!” out loud in a panicked voice and had to look down at his feet, which seemed to be shuffling back and forth of their own accord. Nobody was noticing him lose it.

  Just then, a man who’d been seated beside the driver rose and came down the streetcar collecting fares. He wore a cap, and a leather strap hung heavy over his shoulder. Dash shoved his hand into his pocket and found the change from his wine gums, as well as the wine gum he hadn’t managed to stuff into his mouth. He watched other people pay. Two big brown coins. What the heck were those? He was going to have to get off. Who knew what they did to kids in 1926 who trespassed in theatres and jumped fares on streetcars?

  Suddenly the streetcar stopped hard and he put his hand out to brace himself. Five or six people timbered forward into others. There was a bright light ahead in the road, and Dash smelled what it was over the cigarette fumes: fire. People were tugging down the windows and craning their necks out. Finally the driver opened the doors and asked everyone to step down. As Dash left the streetcar, he saw the fire truck he’d noticed earlier pumping thick ropes of water over a shed burning wildly in a muddy yard. Everyone seemed excited, and it was easy for Dash to separate from the riders and cross the street unseen.

  They’d stopped at River Street. He knew where he was now: on the edge of the Don Valley. Down below ran great channels of concrete roadway and steel rail and a river. River Street’s name had always made sense to him, not like Parliament, which didn’t have a parliament, or Front Street, which wasn’t at the front of anything. But he could really see the river now, as he left Dundas and the crowd. The river had actual banks, not highways, and reeds grew along its edges!

  Beyond River Street and the valley was Dash’s house. And he couldn’t stay here. It was getting colder, and it was still snowing. He’d left his coat at Bloom’s magic show. He could see it there, in his mind’s eye, draped over the back of his third-row seat: his nice, warm coat.

  He’d go home. He’d just go to his house. He knew how to get there, and once he was there, maybe everything would be fine. Maybe the second he walked through the door of his house, he’d pop out on the Canon Theatre stage and everyone would start clapping. And then he’d get in the car with his parents and go home.

  Maybe it would be that easy.

  He walked back to Dundas. It felt like he was entering a lit-up diorama. The shed, still burning over in the muddy yard, was flickering as if under its own spotlight. The trees caught light in their lower branches from the lamps, and the whole town glittered tightly in the west.

  He followed the road and crossed the footbridge over the river to the east end. He would be in his own neighbourhood in ten minutes. But if this was 1926—had his neighbourhood even been built yet? He came to a stop, shuddering. His guts churned. What if even his house was gone?

  The old jail was up the hill, sitting alone. He passed it and went up Broadview Avenue. Broadview wasn’t paved: the road was made of crushed stone. Another streetcar came along and rang its bell at him. He wasn’t sure if it was a greeting or a warning. They didn’t look too stable, those rattling tin boxes full of people smoking.

  And now here was Victor Avenue. He was standing at the end of his own street.

  He began to walk down it, in this dream that wasn’t a dream.

  4

  The trees on Victor Avenue were smaller than he recalled, but there were more of them. Still, the street felt familiar. So familiar it made him dizzy, like he might have to sit down, or run off shouting at the top of his lungs. He decided to sit. There was a slab of stone at the curb in front of number 36. He slowly lowered himself onto its cold surface. As the natural light vanished, the little pole-mounted lanterns along the street buzzed to life.

  Okay. So he’d been sent back in time. Whatevs. Everything was just as you would expect, if you’d been zapped back eighty-five years. There were houses and streets just like the houses and streets he knew. Except they were in 1926. No biggie, right? Someone would help hi
m. Surely.

  He got up and continued walking. He passed his friend Tim’s house, and the house where the baby twins lived. On the other side of the street: that was Carl and Wendy’s; Carl was a fireman. Then Louie Leonidis, who was ninety, probably, and wore his pants up to his rib cage. Dash liked Louie a lot. Louie was the first old man he’d ever really gotten to know. He was very concerned with his lawn. Or maybe he just liked to be outdoors.

  Heh, Dashy! he would say, waving a spindly arm. He was an old Greek man with a small black moustache that was missing some hairs, or else they were very white. You’re a good boy, heh?

  I’m a lost boy!

  He was almost at his house. Some things began to feel really different now. This part of Victor Avenue was quite overgrown with trees. There was one on almost every lawn. Many of the trees downtown had finished changing colours and were shedding their leaves, but here, the street was under a high tunnel of red and orange. Beyond them, down at the end of the street, there seemed to be woods.

  Was he some kind of ghost now? Walking among the dead, before his own birth? Or was he the real and only him, the only Dashiel Woolf who’d ever existed, and now there was no him in the present?

  As he was thinking this, he came to number 94. His house. He paused and swallowed. Then he walked along the flagstones to the steps and climbed them. There was something wrong about the house, he could feel it. He knocked, almost unwillingly, and heard the sound echoing. There were no drapes over the windows and it was dark inside. He looked through the window in the front door and saw empty rooms.

  He tried the handle and the door floated open before him, onto an abandoned foyer with bare walls. There were shadowy discolourations where pictures had once hung.

  “H-hello?”

  He stepped in. His breath came out in little puffs of steam.

  “Hello?”

  There was no answer.

  He crept down the front hall. It was his house, all right, but there was nothing and no one in it. He saw a sheet of paper lying on the floor in the living room, handwriting on it: