by Laird Barron
Yes, okay, he reminded himself. There were more coincidences: Like the dinner with H.P. Lovecraft, both the one three years earlier, and the more recent meal they’d shared just a few weeks ago in September during what would turn out to be Houdini’s final tour—because although he didn’t—couldn’t—know it, he would die on Halloween.
Back in 1923, Houdini had come up with a wild plot about a visit to Egypt and being kidnapped and his pals at Weird Tales had retold Harry’s story to H.P. Lovecraft who did ghostwriting for a piece called, “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs.”
He and Bess (his “champagne coquette” as he sometimes called her) had gone to dinner with H.P. Lovecraft in Providence on a tour stop. Now in 1926, the new book Houdini wanted to collaborate on was going to be about superstition. “You take Bess,” Houdini said as the tuxedoed waiter refilled her wine glass, but poured water for him and Lovecraft, “she was so superstitious when we first married, she thought I was the devil.”
“I actually ran out of the room once,” she laughed, “when Harry showed me a trick using ashes on his arm to spell out my father’s name—Gebhardt—in dark crimson letters. And I was pretty sure I’d never even told him what it was!”
“She would never wear yellow or use any dressing room that supposedly someone had once whistled inside—didn’t matter how many years before!” He grinned.
Lovecraft wiped his lips gently with the napkin, then offered a thin sickle of smile.
“Anyway, I’d like to call this book, The Cancer of Superstition,” Houdini said; a somber tone crept into his voice. “Spiritualism, superstition—people go insane, actually die from these beliefs. They kill themselves to be with loved ones. Or, like that poor New Jersey housewife, Maud Fancher, who poisoned her baby with Lysol, then drank it herself because she believed she could actually help her husband finally achieve the financial success that he never had, that eluded him, by acting as his spirit guide from the great beyond. Is that incredible or what?”
Lovecraft didn’t comment, but then, his world view point, his notions of the cosmos differed vastly from Houdini’s. Still, like other and recent dissonant moments in his life, Harry was suddenly feeling out of sorts. “I believe,” he said, “a man creates his own destiny—”
“I think fate (and you should think of it with a capital ‘F’ in your head) may control us more often than we care to admit. Why? Because to admit it makes us afraid, imbues us with fear—”
“No, no! You have to overcome your fears!” Harry said feeling challenged. Fighting words summoned both his ego and bravado. “Why, I’ve done nothing but face down my fears my whole life—”
“Sure.” Lovecraft nodded. “Fear of drowning trapped inside a packing crate in a river, fear of falling while you hang by your heels twenty stories up and struggle out of a straightjacket, fear of the gall and humiliation of failure...ordinary fears.” Again, his cat-like lips turned upward the merest fraction. “There are deeper fears. There’s fear of the unknown, of the unknowable.”
~
Clifford Eddy, Jr. who was going to collaborate with Lovecraft and Houdini on the encyclopedic book had joined them at the dinner in Providence. But Eddy was something more Houdini thought, removing his bow tie in his hotel room late that night. Eddy was not only a member of Harry’s private secret service, he filed prodigious reports on fraudulent mediums. He was also among the twenty or more friends and relatives with whom Houdini had made private compacts—consisting in each case of a unique secret code—to be communicated after death.
The code with his beloved mother—she whom he’d sincerely hope to contact these ten long years—had been simple. The single word “forgive.” It had to do with Houdini’s brother marrying his own sister-in-law—which caused a huge breach in the family. Bess’s code spelled out the words engraved inside her wedding band. He’d spent a lot of time coming up with the secret words he and Eddy agreed on, but in the end Harry chose something that symbolized an eternal truth beyond the grave, that put paid to the phony mediums who preyed on the bereaved. Eddy’s code was wordplay on Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem: “Conquered the Worm!”
Houdini sat down. He recalled that during dinner a few hours earlier, Eddy had jumped to Harry’s defense when Houdini was talking about overcoming his fears. As if to remind Lovecraft that his own early work had been influenced by Poe, Eddy said, “In “Ligeia” the Lady says—and I’m paraphrasing here—that we don’t yield to death unless our own will is too feeble. So fate doesn’t control our lives. Maybe it doesn’t even control our deaths!”
Lovecraft had merely shrugged.
“Will is everything!” Houdini had agreed.
Bess said, “Harry goes in for mind over matter,” and told them about how Harry didn’t take painkillers even though for years he’d been sleeping every single night with a pillow wedged under his left kidney after it had been severely injured during a performance. “It still pains him constantly,” she said, “but it never stops him.”
A short while later the dinner party broke up; all three men saw Bess safely to a cab, they said their goodnights and he and Eddy walked back to the hotel. But now, sitting in the dimly lit hotel room Houdini was left wondering. Those goddamn coincidences and signs…like omens.
Eddy had reported during their moonlit sidewalk stroll that Doyle’s coterie was once again predicting Houdini would die.
“The whole bunch has been saying that twaddle for years—the English circle of madmen and the crazies he’s influenced over here, too,” Houdini said. “Stupid as hell—these control spirits they channel that make so-called predictions. What’s he call his control? —Oh yeah, Pheneas. Jesus Christ.”
Eddy snickered and they both tried to laugh it off. “Oh Arthur,” he mimicked in a high falsetto imitating Lady Doyle, “I think Pheneas is coming through.” Then he dropped his voice. “Yes, our beloved Sir Arthur, it is so. Houdini is all washed up. Houdini is doomed. Doomed.”
“Uh-huh. Doom! Doom! Doom and gloom. ‘Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for me,’” Harry laughed.
But he was more shaken than he let on. Eddy had been carrying a rosewood walking stick, and Houdini had playfully taken it from him tapping it against the sidewalk, then bouncing it against the upraised tip of his shoe, caught it neatly in his hand, then danced it down his elbow and back again before palming it and pretending to insert it down his throat like a sword swallower.
“Good you didn’t get spit all over my best cane, Harry,” Eddy joked, polishing the silver cap against his sleeve.
They shook hands in the lobby, Eddy went toward the elevator and Harry, still pretending he didn’t give a damn what the control spirits were shouting through phony mediums here and abroad, headed up the stairs to his third floor room which adjoined Bess’s suite.
He was still sitting on the bed when the phone rang. Harry glanced guiltily at the door that led through to Bess’s room. She was typically a heavy sleeper but he kept his voice low when he picked up.
“Harry, it’s me.”
“I was just thinking about you,” he said. Instantly the image of Leona Derwatt his former premier box jumper/assistant and current informant/spy spiraled up in his mind. Always he saw her as she’d been before the crippling polio tanked her stage career. Beautiful green eyes and coppery hair. An impish face. A trim lithe figure, and oh boy, she was some krassavitseh—a doll. Still, his mother would have said about her (and plenty of the other women he had flings with, “Okay, so she’s not a kurveh, Harry. She’s not a tramp. But she’s still a shikseh—just like your wife, another gentile. And also just like your wife, also oisgeshtrobelt. Overdressed—like she’s constantly having tea with the royal family. He didn’t know exactly why, but when he thought of his darlings, he almost always reverted to Yiddish. Maybe guilt. Must be guilt—it was after all, his mother’s opinions (though in life she hadn’t known about the affairs) about his women he heard in his head. Couldn’t be that up in heaven she watched him shtupping the kur
vehs, right? Nah. Couldn’t be.
“So what’s the word, Leona?” he said. She’d been diligently obtaining the certifications and documents that gave her ministry after ministry (they cost between $3 and $5—no education necessary—and made a hugely impressive roll when they were carried onto the stage each night in the third part of his act and unfurled). Harry would tell the audience how his own father was a scholar, how years of study entitled him to be genuinely called Rabbi and how they should be wary of these priest-wolves out to fleece them with fake messages from their dead loved ones. Just lately Leona had been working on trapping one of these shysters in New York who (surprise, surprise!) ran a church and claimed he had supernatural powers. “Did you get him?”
“Used a Dictaphone,” she began; then Harry heard a pause. Was someone listening in? Tapping his hotel line? He wondered.
“Leona? Hey, are you there?”
What he heard next was a series of screeches that descended into guttural growls. As if instead of talking to Leona he was listening to the teeth-bared rumblings of a wolf or a killer-dog. The phone suddenly felt ice-cold in his hands. So cold it stung the flesh of his palm and finger tips.
A low, taunting voice whispered at him: “Your mind is divided, Harry. Divided. You want to prove how many fakes there are because you’re secretly afraid there is nothing supernatural anywhere in the universe. But your father was a rabbi…and you long to see him again. You want to believe. You need to believe. Just like the poor grief-struck gullible janes and joes you’re always taking up for…. You miss your mother more than you can bare to contemplate…and your secret codes—that’s you telling yourself even if all the old religions are gone, there is life after death. Do you hear me, Harry?”
Huh? Was Leona mad at him? But that couldn’t have been her whispering, could it? It wasn’t his own subconscious, either. Not possible, he told himself. A joke maybe….
“Leona!” Before he hung up the receiver, he called her name again and again.
He could literally see his breath fogging the air, but there was no answer—only the sight of his words dissolving into thin white vapor.
He didn’t drink, he didn’t take drugs (that was Bess’s bailiwick to his chagrin) but before the practical side of him won out and he decided he’d just call Leona tomorrow, he felt a tic of unease: Was it some kind of supernatural contact or had he just hallucinated the whole thing?
~
He’d finally perfected performing what he was now calling “The Pyramid Mystery,” the culmination of the experiment in being buried alive he’d first practiced ten years earlier in California. Harry was a born publicity hound and if people were crazy for all things Egyptian, by god, he’d give them a show they’d never forget.
On stage he was strapped into a strait jacket and sealed inside a casket. Then he was lowered into an enormous glass box. His numerous male assistants shoveled tons of sand onto him, covering him completely. It took more than a few suspense-filled minutes before he emerged in shirt sleeves to the cheering audiences. It was the biggest production number in the history of his career. But it was so time consuming and tricky to mount, he decided he’d only use it on the tour in the stops that lasted at least two weeks.
At least that’s what he told his ingenieurs—and himself. In reality, he knew that sealed inside the casket, even with his thoughts focused on the mechanics of escape, his mind returned again and again to the dark, frightening images of ancient Egypt, the mysteries beyond death he seemed so close to grasping. The worst dread came from the sense that just beyond the angle of his vision black shadows roamed waiting to catch at him, to drag him into some terrible half-life that was neither the quiet dark of death nor the sunlit peace of a heaven.
His loyal staff told him, they didn’t mind taking the trouble. It was a great effect—
Harry cut them off. “No! Not in the smaller venues. Absolutely not.”
If they were surprised when he shouted, no one said a word.
Then in Toronto, about to be lowered upside down inside the famous water-filled Chinese pagoda, the hoisting tackle slipped and he fractured his ankle. He wouldn’t let the pain stop him and he carried on with the show. Look at Sarah Bernhardt, he reminded himself. Lost her leg and still performs. He wasn’t going to give in either.
He kept right on performing after he was gut-punched by a student and his fever began to rise. When it hit 104 degrees he was taken by ambulance to the hospital for emergency surgery to repair his ruptured, gangrenous appendix. Will is everything. He kept on persevering, kept on fighting for the next six days while they tried experimental serums to save him.
In the hospital the dreams were so vivid he might have been standing in the center of a circle of projection screens showing color films. His mind was actively enumerating the many signs and symbols and omens that plagued him these last months.
Mostly he was lucid, but one night after he’d asked to eat some farmer’s chop suey—a dish made with vegetables in sour cream popular in Jewish families—he told the young doctor attending him that he wished he’d made something more of his own life. That while the doctor was genuine and proved it daily in helping the sick—he himself was a fraud. The doctor tried to brush it off, saying that Houdini had literally entertained and enthralled millions of people and brought them a measure of happiness.
Harry let it go. He’d only been talking to keep the dreams and hideous visions at bay.
On Saturday he wrote a letter to a friend. Another small occupation as he sensed that whatever his will was keeping on the other side of some crumbling wall was pressing closer.
That night he dreamt of the strange confluence of events and ideas. The secret codes to guard against the finality of death, the odd premonitions sealed inside both buried and submerged caskets. The superstitions and fears, the thoughts his mind had cobbled together into a pastiche of Egyptian rituals and mysteries. An old religion gone, vanished—except for the hieroglyphs and artifacts, the towering monuments and tombs half-immured under shifting, wind-borne sands. But they had worshipped, they had believed! Was the embalming and the tomb really a gateway to eternity? What waited there?
A shape in the shadows.
And then he saw it: an amorphous cold, monstrous being, huge beyond reckoning. Both as vague and as gray-white definite as heavy mist, as shapeless and all-encompassing as rolling sea fog. And with no connection to the little puppets that the living called men and women and children. He wished for the last time that he and Bess had children.
Religions—all of them—then and now…nothing.
Better a yawning hell, because then there would be a heaven.
There was nothing to come back from, because there was nothing to go into.
There was only an end.
Nothing.
Mind and will were everything because in the end there was nothing.
On Sunday October 31st, 1926 he said softly, “I guess I can’t fight anymore.”
His eyes dimmed and the earthlight that was Houdini was no more.
GIRLS WITHOUT THEIR FACES ON
by Laird Barron
Delia’s father had watched her drowning when she was a little girl. The accident happened in a neighbor’s pool. Delia lay submerged near the bottom, her lungs filling with chlorinated water. She could see Dad’s distorted form bent forward, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, cigarette dangling from his lips, blandly inquisitive. Mom scooped Delia out and smacked her between the shoulder blades while she coughed and coughed.
Delia didn’t think about it often. Not often.
~
Barry F threw a party at his big, opulent house on Hillside East. He invited people to come after sundown. A whole slew of them heeded the call. Some guests considered Barry F an eccentric. This wasn’t eccentric—sundown comes early in autumn in Alaska. Hours passed and eventually the door swung wide, emitting piano music, laughter, a blaze of chandelier light. Three silhouettes lingered; a trinity of Christmas ghosts: Delia; D
elia’s significant other, J; and Barry F.
“—the per capita death rate in Anchorage is outsized,” Barry F said. “Out-fucking-sized. This town is the armpit. No, it’s the asshole—”
“Bethel is the asshole,” J said.
“Tell it on the mountain, bro.”
“I’ll tell you why Bethel is the worst. My dad was there on a job for the FAA in ’77. He’s eating breakfast at the Tundra Diner and a janitor walks past his table, lugging a honey bucket—”
“Honey bucket?”
“Plumbing froze, so folks crapped in a bucket and dumped it in a sewage lagoon out back. Honey bucket. It’s a joke. Anyway, the dude trips on his shoelace…Go on. Imagine the scene. Envision that motherfucker. Picking toilet paper outta your scrambled eggs kills the appetite. Plus, cabin fever, and homies die in the bush all the livelong day. Alcoholism, poverty, rape. Worst of the worst.”
“Please,” Delia said. “Can we refrain from trashing a native village for the sin of not perfectly acclimating to a predatory takeover by the descendants of white European invaders?”
“Ooh, my girlfriend doesn’t enjoy the turn of conversation. Sorry, my precious little snowflake. Folks weren’t so politically correct in the 1970s. I’m just reporting the news.”
“If we’re talking about assholes, look no further than a mirror.”
“Kids, kids, don’t fight, don’t derail the train,” Barry F said with an oily, avuncular smile. “Anchorage is still bad. Right?”
“Wretched. Foul.”
“And on that note…” Delia said.
“Haven’t even gotten to the statistics for sexual assault and disappearances—”