by Laird Barron
They sat together, quiet, their heads leaned together. “Sometimes, I dream about kissing you,” Haritha said, and Constance felt her heart burst.
“My mom hates you. She says we can’t be friends anymore. I told her I was spending the night with Kayla tonight. She doesn’t know I’m here,” Constance said instead of pressing her mouth to Haritha’s.
“I know.”
Constance did not say she loved Haritha. She did not say she’d thought about kissing Haritha, too.
“Come on.” Haritha pulled at Constance’s hand, and together, they crept into Haritha’s closet.
Haritha draped the veil over Constance’s head. Probably, it wasn’t a veil at all. Probably it was a scarf, but Constance closed her eyes and imagined herself covered in lace and tulle. This is what it would be like to be a bride. This breathless, airy suspension. The moment before the world dropped away and revealed all of its ugliness and splendor.
“The same,” Constance whispered, and in the gloom she thought she saw Haritha smile.
“Is this what you want?” she asked, and Constance breathed in and opened her mouth.
“Yes.”
~
Twice more, her mother had knocked on Constance’s door. “You have to eat something, sweetie,” she called, but Constance did not answer. “I’m leaving a sandwich outside the door, okay? Even if you eat just half of it, it’s better than nothing.”
Only when her mother had gone away, her bedroom door closing behind her, did Constance open her own and pull the plate into her room. She nibbled at the crusts, but the turkey was room temperature, and her mother had put mayonnaise on the sandwich, so the bread had gone soggy. It made her feel sick, so she pushed it away.
When Haritha came back, they could run away. Constance had two hundred dollars saved. Babysitting money she’d squirreled away in a shoebox tucked in the very back of her closet. They could buy bus tickets and get as far away from here as possible.
She wouldn’t think about what may come after that. About how two girls could possibly avoid detection without starving to death first. She would not.
“I should have told you. Should have said it out loud. So you would have known,” she said, and again came that feeling of the room swelling around her.
She wondered who would be at the funeral. Haritha’s family. Her mother and father with their quiet, small mouths. There were no brothers and sisters. No grandmothers or grandfathers. Only the three of them making their own world in the tiny house on Cresthill Street. Maybe a few of the nicer kids from school. The ones who felt they should go even though they hadn’t known Haritha very well, but she had never been unkind to them. Ms. Treleigh, their teacher, and maybe Mr. Harruth, their principal.
A tiny group, and none of them would know her. They would sit, stone-faced and silent, and file past the too-small casket, and then it would be over. They would go back to school and ignore the empty desk.
Outside, the sky faded from amber into twilight, and Constance flexed her fingers and watched as her skin went dark, but it was from shadow, not from magic, and she swallowed against the lump in her throat and tried to tell herself she didn’t feel as if she’d been scooped hollow.
From the closet, something made a sound. An intake of breath. A sigh.
Perhaps it was the death of a prayer. Perhaps it was the start of something else. Something else altogether.
She crept forward on hands and knees. She closed her eyes.
~
The dark hadn’t found them. Not in the way Constance had imagined it would. They sat together, their knees touching, and breathed into the night-shaded room, but Constance could still see the silvered glow of the moon. That fabled creature that had brought two girls together but now ignored them as they huddled together, the thing they both wanted more than anything unspoken but burning between them.
They sat until they heard the loud knocking, the shouts and confused mumbling from Haritha’s father as he stumbled to the door. Constance knew the voice, knew her mother had found her out and come to collect her daughter, and she started, shifted forward, but Haritha grasped her hand and pulled her back.
“Not yet. It’s not finished yet,” she said, and her touch was feather light, and Constance sank back into the sound of her voice.
“Where is she? Is she here?” Her mother’s voice had gone quiet. Embarrassed now that she was inside.
Inside the closet, Haritha laughed. A high, delicate sound that settled into Constance’s bones. It bothered Constance to not be able to see her face, and she lifted her hand to pull back the fabric, but Haritha shook her head.
“Don’t” Haritha said and leaned forward, her hands hesitant and grasping as they found Constance’s shoulders and pulled her forward.
Outside, Constance’s mother rattled the door. She said her name over and over. Told her to get her things. Told her she would never come here again. Told her to tell Haritha goodbye.
The moon flickered, the dull glow suddenly winking out, and then Haritha’s mouth pressed against hers, the fabric a terrible barrier between them. Constance let her hands creep beneath the scarf and pressed her fingers to Haritha’s wet cheeks.
“Don’t cry,” she said and locked down on the scream building in the deepest parts of her.
“Goodbye,” Haritha said, and the closet door opened.
~
Two hours passed and still Constance waited in the dark. There had been no other sounds. No other movement, and Constance had gone back to her bed and wrapped her quilt around her shoulders.
It hadn’t worked. There had never been two girls brought together by the moon. It had just been a stupid story, and Haritha had come to the end and opened herself up. Shaking fingers and a razor blade. Bloodletting under that beautiful, glowing light.
In and out of a fitful sleep, Constance drifted. She dreamed of Haritha come back, but Haritha had no face. No eyes. No mouth. On all fours, she jerked forward like an insect, and Constance opened her arms, let Haritha cover every inch of her, the weight so great she couldn’t breathe.
When she woke, she knew it was because the room had gone completely dark. No moonlight shone through her blinds, and she sat up, her hands twitching against the quilt.
“Is it you?”
The closet door creaked open, and Constance let out a sob.
Whatever had opened the door shuffled forward. A slow, steady creeping that stopped next to her bed, and then its weight pressed down as it pulled itself onto the bed with her and curled its body against hers.
“Haritha,” she said, and the thing turned and faced her, but she still couldn’t see. Couldn’t know if they’d finally become the same.
The thing pressed its mouth against Constance, and it tasted of cold and deep earth, but Constance opened her mouth and breathed in all and understood.
“I’m not afraid,” she said, and the thing brought its teeth to Constance’s skin.
In the morning, Constance knew what it was her mother would find.
It would not be her daughter.
It would be something else.
“For the last four months, the magician [Houdini] had been exhibiting suspiciously uncharacteristic behavior, including aggressive confrontations and severe mood swings.”
—William Kalush and Larry Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini
“Houdini admitted that these curses and predictions weighed on his mind.”
—William Kalush and Larry Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini
“He believed in Hell now. Which meant that somewhere up there, God existed….”
—Christopher Golden, Ararat
“Mystery attracts mystery. Ever since the wide appearance of my name as a performer of unexplained feats, I have encountered strange narratives and events….”
—H.P. Lovecraft (ghostwriting as Harry Houdini)
HOUDINI: THE EGYPTIAN PARADIGM
by Lisa Mannetti
There were times, he knew, when all of life seeme
d poised to reveal itself in a way that was comprehensible down to one’s marrow, a knowledge born deep inside one’s soul. Harry also knew there were signs. And just lately, those signs were coming together—congealing, he thought—in a way that was unmistakable. He mentally thumbed through the list he’d carefully adumbrated in his mind from Bess to Bey to Lovecraft to the Pyramid Mystery to the Shelton Pool to Leona Derwatt—he sighed. One at a time, he told himself.
One at a time. Okay. Take the business of that fakir (and faker!) Rahman Bey. Even the theater critics (goddamn thick-headed fickle idiots!) were calling the Egyptian’s act brilliant, mesmerizing. As if—as if he, the great Houdini—hadn’t written about—exposed!—every single effect Bey wrought years and years ago. In God only knew how many pamphlets and books that Harry wrote about miracle mongers and fraudulent mediums. It made him furious. Every illusion Bey unloosed on the stage of New York’s Selwyn Theater in 1926 galled Houdini. From the faux trances that preceded the good-looking heavy-lidded youth’s cheek pinning (sans blood) to hypnotizing animals and claiming he could stop both his heart and his breathing while he was buried alive in an airtight coffin! Houdini could do all of it—had done all of it—by natural means without the phony psychic trance claims. By “natural means” Harry meant employing the deception and sleight of hand that is part of the magician’s trade—but that was honest trickery because people knew mystification was part of the entertainment, part of the game, part of the fun. There was nothing supernatural about it. Long steel hatpins inserted into cheeks and lips? Nothing that deft manipulation of loose skin wouldn’t render simple and harmless. And bloodless. Altering the pulse? Try a couple of hard India rubber balls secreted under the armpits and you, too, can change how even a bona fide physician perceives the pumping of your blood through your veins so slowly, they’d pronounce you near death. Easy stuff; no, Kindergarten stuff!
Then Bey had himself soldered into a bronze casket and lowered into the murky waters of the Hudson River declaring he’d remain immersed using cataleptic anesthesia and trance for one full hour. An alarm bell, in case of emergencies, was rigged inside the casket. After four minutes, the alarm sounded and workmen retrieved him using chisels and shears to cut through the lid. Bey maintained (that since he was in trance) he had no memory of tripping the signal and he must have rolled onto it by accident. Still, because of the difficulty of releasing him from a genuine “unrigged” box, he was without air for twenty minutes according to his handlers and spokesmen….
“It’s hype; it’s a lie. He got yellow and rang the alarm after four measly minutes,” Harry countered, fuming in a letter written to a friend. “And well, well, well, he’s suddenly claiming to be a genuine miracle man—so now I’ll show him how it should be done!” he said. “Without a lot of hooey about trances and catalepsy, you betcha!”
But Houdini had griped too soon. Bey had himself sealed inside a zinc coffin and lowered into a New York swimming pool. Depending, as Harry knew, on which newspaper you read, he’d survived either thirty-six minutes or one entire hour without life-sustaining oxygen.
Harry’s “guns were spiked,” he said. He was 52 and he went on a rigorous diet and exercise program (losing thirteen pounds in three weeks). Then the greatest escapologist in history had his own galvanized iron coffin manufactured by the Boyerstown Burial Casket Company and on August 5, 1926 was submerged into the warmish waters of New York’s Shelton Hotel pool. Some experts said a man could only live on the carbon-dioxide mix of lean air for three or four minutes—less time than it took for Houdini to be welded inside the casket. Spectators lined up three-deep to watch the drama enfold.
Newspapers called it “The Shelton Pool Miracle.”
One hour and thirty-one minutes later, he emerged, sweating, breathing heavily, deathly pale, and victorious….
But not, he now realized, without a price.
~
The first time this peculiar and terrible feeling of dread, this frisson had come over him was way back nine or ten years earlier while he first practiced the Buried Alive stunt in Santa Ana, California. His two most trusted assistants, Jim Collins and James Vickery, had not only helped dig the pit, they were standing by—shovels at the ready—just in case things went awry.
Houdini had had no trouble escaping during the early rehearsals when the piled-on soil was a couple of feet. It was the combination, he thought, of thinking of the six-foot (just like a grave!) depth of the hole, the sudden flicker-memory of his mother’s recent death, and the premonition he’d actually had about her passing in a Monte Carlo graveyard that sent him into—for the very first time in the escapologist’s career—a spiraling panic. For reasons he never understood completely, he kept hearing the word “sphinx” repeated again and again—as if some ancient mystery was on the verge of being revealed—but was just beyond his earthly grasp. Much worse was the feeling that he’d never get out alive as the damp, heavy dirt crushed his chest and found its way into his mouth and nose. He was so focused on clawing upward that he wasn’t even aware of the scraping sounds of the digging going on above him as Vickery and Collins realized the safe time had already ticked away, calling out “Boss, Boss?” in panicky voices and frantically trying to uncover him.
Just as they nearly reached Houdini, his left hand shot upward through the earth. He emerged filthy, his heart pounding, spitting out dirt and trying to take deep breaths. That was bad enough, but much more anxiety-making were the half-glimpsed dark images of ancient Egypt, the sinking feeling he was being pursued to his doom, the fear roiling like a maddened serpent in his guts and whirring in his mind. All he really had, he told himself, was his mind—his iron will and determination—to push his hardened body up to and beyond ordinary limits.
It wasn’t precisely like when his mother died; it shocked him back then to realize that all ambition, all desire to perform had completely left him. It stayed away (and that way) for a long time. Too long, really. He didn’t much care if he lived or died. This dread wasn’t the soul-numbing realization that he had to continue the rest of his life without her, but it was just as terrible. He felt stalked by…someone…something…nameless—yet powerful beyond reckoning. Something with the arcane exotica of Cairo’s hidden, twisting back alleys and byways. A smell perhaps that went beyond the actual odor of sun-heated spices, crumbling whited masonry, crowded soukhs, and dank, secret passages; beyond even the aura of Eastern babble, the sharp scent of hashish, and the evocative, old beauty of the Muslim morning call to prayer….
He collected everything from books to magic apparatus to oddities, but for Chrissakes, he reminded himself, he was not superstitious, he was not; it certainly wasn’t because he’d purchased a genuine mummy at a New York auction for a grand total of $3—not when he was making thousands of dollars a week. And so what if while he was immersed under the weight of water and lying inside a hot metal coffin he’d thought about Egypt and the wind-borne sands and the deeper mysteries they covered slowly and inexorably over time…. They had a force, a life of their own. Shifting, growing. They drifted slowly, a few grains at a time, concealing the entrances to royal tombs. They were eternal and cyclic these sands—covering, uncovering…slyly revealing hints of age-old burial sites with the cunning of a skilled magician. Inside the sealed coffin, helpless to stop the onslaught cascading in his mind, he’d considered the East and trembled inwardly. Now, the merest random association—just hearing the word “Egypt”—much less suddenly flashing on his time in the sunken box pinged him.
He pulled himself together mentally and wrote to several curious, close magician friends (who wanted to know how he managed the effect) that there was no trick to remaining in the stifling coffin under water at the Shelton Pool: “You just lie there completely still and breathe…slowly, calmly, shallowly. That’s it! There’s no trick! Period!”
Writing that down helped; it allayed his anxiety for the moment. But in the off times he did anything else—like the come-down period after a show; the calm he in
duced before he’d sleep his customary four or five hours a night; about to take the first bite of his favorite paprika-christened chicken with spätzle—in the brief lulls of his busy life, the fear would suddenly overtake him and he’d feel a pang racing toward his guts like a sword swallowed and thrust down his throat. It shook him, made him sweat…and it stayed on and on, as unsettling as the lingering of an unexpected—and unwelcome—visitor.
Get over it Harry! But no…. The overwhelming feeling—compulsion!—he had to go over it all again. So, he sighed inwardly and went back to counting up those niggling signs….
The whole country was keen for—mad about—Egypt. The boy-king Tut’s tomb had been opened and the exotic allure of the East not only garnered headlines, it permeated everything from movies to street chatter to advertising. Hell, you could open any magazine and read all about it or walk into any drugstore and buy Egyptian beauty creams, Nerma cigarettes and perfumes like Sphinx in pyramid-shaped glass bottles. You could find dozens of instructions for make-it-yourself cloth or crepe-paper Halloween costumes. All the extra you needed was a pair of leather sandals, a brass arm bracelet coiled like an asp, and a huckaback linen headdress.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who believed nearly all things mystical and/or related to spiritualism—even the most outrageous fantasies like the fairy world—broadcast his certainty that Lord Carnarvon had died as a result of a mummy’s curse. “There are many malevolent spirits. I certainly think it’s possible,” Doyle told a New York Times reporter during his American visit, “that some occult influence caused his death.”
On the west coast, Houdini averred Carnarvon died from the insect bite (plus complications) that actually killed the amateur archeologist. The L.A. Times, aware of the rift between the two famous men asked Harry’s opinion and he couldn’t resist taking a potshot at Doyle: “If, as Sir Arthur says, an avenging spirit was probably the cause of the explorer’s death, why is it no other Egyptologist has been killed?”