Houdini and Me

by Dan Gutman

  “Where did you hide all that lock-picking stuff?” I asked.

  “SOMETIMES BESS WOULD SLIP ME SOMETHING WHILE SHE WAS GIVING ME A KISS,” was the reply. SOMETIMES I HID IT IN A FAKE HOLLOW FINGER. THEY NEVER COUNT YOUR FINGERS.”

  Wow. This guy was blowing my mind. He was either really good, or he was really Houdini.

  But he couldn’t be Houdini! Houdini was long dead. And you can’t communicate with dead people—who, by the way, didn’t have cell phones in 1926. I had to keep telling myself not to let this guy make a fool out of me.

  “Knowing all that stuff only proves you’re a fake!” I tapped. “Everybody knows that magicians never reveal their secrets.”

  “DEAD ONES WOULD,” was the response. “WHAT DO I HAVE TO LOSE? MY LIFE IS OVER.”

  He had a point, I suppose. If he was really dead, there was no reason to hold onto his secrets anymore. He might as well tell the world. My head was spinning.

  “ARE YOU CONVINCED NOW?” it said on my screen.

  I thought about it for a long time before replying.

  “No,” I tapped. But honestly, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Maybe the guy really was Houdini, talking to me from the grave.

  “IF I COULD NOT EXPLAIN MY TRICKS, YOU WOULD HAVE SAID I WASN’T HOUDINI. AND WHEN I EXPLAINED MY TRICKS, YOU SAID I WASN’T HOUDINI. WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO PROVE I AM WHO I SAY I AM?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “YOU HAVE ASKED ENOUGH QUESTIONS. NOW LET ME ASK A QUESTION OF YOU.”

  “Go ahead,” I tapped. I can play along.

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  “You don’t know who I am?” I tapped.

  “NO.”

  “My name is Harry Mancini,” I tapped. “I’m eleven years old.”

  “AND WHAT YEAR IS IT?”

  “It is the 21st century,” I tapped, tapping out the year to be more specific. There was a long pause.

  “NOW IT IS YOU WHO IS MAKING THINGS UP.”

  “I swear it’s true,” I tapped.

  “WHERE DO YOU LIVE?”

  “New York City,” I tapped.

  “WHERE IN NYC?”

  “In Harlem,” I tapped.

  “WHERE IN HARLEM?”

  “278 West 113th Street,” I tapped before it occurred to me that I shouldn’t give out my address to a total stranger.

  “THAT’S MY HOUSE!” he replied.

  “I know!” I tapped.

  “YOU LIVE IN MY HOUSE?”

  Something occurred to me.

  “How come you could tell me exactly how I could have gotten out of the escape room,” I tapped, “but you didn’t know where or when I live?”

  I waited for a response. Nothing.

  Aha! I had him! He couldn’t answer that. He was a fake! I don’t know how he pulled it off, but he did it.

  “Why did you contact…” I couldn’t tap in the word “me.” It didn’t show up on the screen.

  Then I noticed that the screen was blank.

  The battery of the cell phone had died.

  A PIECE OF JUNK

  The next day I got to school early. I needed to speak to Zeke before first period.

  “I gotta talk to you,” I said when I saw him at his locker.

  “I gotta talk to you too, Harry,” he told me. “You won’t believe what happened to me last night. Five minutes after I went to bed there was a siren outside my window. I figured it was an ambulance or a fire engine or something, so I got out of bed to see what was going on. And do you know what was out there?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It was some kid with a boom box playing a rap song with a siren sound in the middle of it.”

  “That’s it?” I asked. “That’s the exciting thing that happened to you last night?”

  “Yeah. I thought it was pretty cool.”

  I looked into his eyes to see if he was putting me on. With Zeke, you could never tell.

  “What did you want to talk to me about?” he asked.

  “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “No,” he replied. “How could I possibly know?”

  “So you didn’t do it, did you?”

  “No,” he said. “Well, that depends. Do what?”

  I told him about the cell phone and my text conversation with “Harry Houdini.” He couldn’t believe it either.

  “Your story was way better than mine,” he admitted when I finished.

  “The guy was really convincing,” I said. “He knew everything about Houdini. He even knew that Houdini had a bullet stuck in his hand most of his life. Hardly anybody knows that.”

  “So who was it?” Zeke asked.

  “I don’t know!” I told him. “I thought it was you.”

  “I swear it wasn’t me,” Zeke said. “And how do you even know it was a guy? It could have been a woman. It could have been a kid. It could have been a bot. With text, it could have been anybody.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “I have no idea who it was. Do you think it could really have been Houdini?”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts or supernatural stuff like that,” Zeke said.

  “Me neither,” I replied. “But you never know. Weird stuff happens.”

  “Did he try to sell you anything?” Zeke asked. “Did he ask you for money or your Social Security number? That would be a sure sign it was a scam.”

  “That’s the thing,” I told Zeke. “He didn’t ask for a dime. It was like he just wanted to talk to somebody.”

  “I’ll say this much,” Zeke told me. “That was a great prank. I wish I had come up with that idea. But let me ask you this. No offense, Harry, but are you sure you’re not still messed up in the head a little bit after being in a coma?”

  “I’m fine, Zeke,” I told him.

  “I mean, maybe you were dreaming, or hallucinating, or something.”

  “I wasn’t dreaming,” I insisted. “I wasn’t hallucinating. It happened.”

  “Then somebody was messing with you,” Zeke said. “Lemme see the cell phone.”

  I was about to get the phone out of my backpack when the bell rang for first period. I had to go to math. Zeke is in the other fifth-grade class, and he had history.

  “I’ll bring it with me to lunch,” I told him.

  Lunchtime finally came and Zeke waved me over to a table in the corner where we could have some privacy. I pulled the cell phone out of my backpack and handed it to him.

  “A flip phone?” he asked, chuckling. “Who gave this to you, Alexander Graham Bell?”

  “Funny,” I said. “I know. It’s a relic.”

  “They probably had phones like this when Houdini was alive,” Zeke cracked. “Who gave it to you?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I found it with all the flowers and candy and stuff in my room when I was in the hospital. There was no note or anything with it.”

  “Maybe your mom gave it to you,” Zeke guessed. “After what happened to you, maybe she wants you to have a cell phone so you can reach her in an emergency.”

  “It wasn’t my mom,” I said. “She told me just last week that she didn’t think I was ready for a cell phone. And if she did give me one, she would’ve said something.”

  “You didn’t tell her about this, right?” Zeke asked.

  “No way. Not yet.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Zeke said, handing the cell phone back to me. “Turn it on.”

  “I can’t turn it on,” I told him. “The battery’s dead. It died last night while I was texting with the Houdini impersonator.”

  “Then we need to get a charger for it, or a new battery,” Zeke said. “How much money do you have on you?”

  After school, Zeke and I walked down Broadway until we found a little store with a sign in the window that said they fix new and used cell phones.

  “May I help you?” a teenage girl with purple hair and a pierced nose asked when we walked in.

  “I need to buy a cell phone charger,” I told her, pul
ling the phone out of my backpack. She looked at it, turning it over in her hand.

  “Wow, are you kiddin’ me?” she asked. “My mother used to have one like this a long time ago. They haven’t sold these in years. I don’t think they make chargers or batteries for these anymore.”

  “I know,” I replied. “I just thought I’d give it a shot.”

  “Why don’t you just get a new cell phone?” she asked. “We have a bunch you can look at. You can’t even get online with this one. Don’t the kids at your school make fun of you for carrying this thing around?”

  I didn’t want to explain the whole story about Houdini. She would never believe it.

  “It’s complicated,” I told her. “But I need a charger for this one. It’s kind of important.”

  She looked at me like I was a little crazy.

  “It’s a retro thing,” Zeke told her. “Like listening to vinyl records. All the cool kids are getting into flip phones now.”

  “Just ignore him,” I told her. “I need to charge it up to see if it works.”

  “Have you tried eBay?” she asked. “You might find old phone chargers there. Sorry I can’t help, you guys.”

  Bummer.

  “Maybe we should try Craigslist first,” Zeke said as we were about to open the door to leave. But the girl with the purple hair was calling to us.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” she said. “I just remembered. We have this junk drawer. Follow me.”

  She led us to the back of the store, where she opened up a big drawer and said we could rummage around in there as long as we liked. It was a mess, like a graveyard of old cell phones and cell phone parts. There were a bunch of chargers in there. I tried a few with jacks that didn’t fit into my phone. But the fourth or fifth one seemed to fit.

  “That doesn’t mean it’s gonna charge the thing,” Zeke told me. “But it might.”

  “I hope it does,” I replied as I took out my wallet. “It’s gonna cost a lot of money. I bet these things are hard to find.”

  All I had in my wallet was a ten-dollar bill and two fives.

  “How much do I owe you?” I asked the girl with purple hair.

  “Take it,” she said, waving my money away. “I feel sorry for you, carrying that antique around in broad daylight. Nobody else is gonna want the charger.”

  “Hey, thanks!”

  “No prob,” she said. “Come back when you’re ready to get a phone from this century.”

  We went back to Zeke’s house so my mom wouldn’t see what we were doing. He plugged the charger into the wall outlet in his room and plugged my phone into the charger.

  “It may not work,” Zeke said. “But at least it didn’t cost you anything.”

  A little red light went on and the screen lit up, which I took to be a good sign. Zeke knows his way around cell phones. He said it might take hours for the phone to get a full charge, but in the meantime we should be able to use it. That is, if it worked.

  “Let’s check the texts,” he said as he fumbled with the little rubber keypad. “Any old texts you sent or received should still be here.”

  But they weren’t. He poked around, trying all kinds of stuff, but he couldn’t retrieve the texts from the previous night. They were gone.

  “Maybe we can trace the source of the texts,” Zeke said. “If we can find out the number where they came from, it might help us find out who was sending them to you.”

  He fiddled with the keypad, but again, nothing. The memory had been wiped clean. It was like the flip phone had never been used.

  “It’s scrubbed,” Zeke said, “Nothin’ there.”

  “Bummer.”

  “Are you sure you’re not messed up in the head since the coma?” Zeke asked. “That stuff happens, y’know. You could be brain damaged, like all those football players who got multiple concussions. I’m serious.”

  I felt myself getting angry at Zeke.

  “So you don’t believe me,” I said sadly.

  “Sure I believe you, man!” Zeke replied. “I just think that maybe you should talk to a shrink or somebody.”

  “I’m fine,” I insisted, my voice going up a little. “I didn’t imagine it! I had a long text conversation on this phone with somebody. I’m not saying it was the real Houdini, but he knew everything about Houdini. That’s a fact.”

  I caught Zeke smirking. He thought I was crazy. And I couldn’t blame him, really. The whole thing was crazy. You can’t communicate with dead people through a cell phone! I wasn’t even sure you could communicate with live people with this cell phone. Maybe Zeke was right. Maybe I was hallucinating.

  Zeke wasn’t ready to give up just yet. He tried calling his own cell phone from my flip phone, but the call wouldn’t go through. He would have liked to try calling the flip phone from his cell phone, but neither of us knew the number.

  “This thing is a piece of junk,” Zeke said, tossing the phone to me. “You might as well throw it away. Or bring it back to the cell phone store. Maybe they can recycle it for parts. But I doubt it. Maybe you should take it to an antique store. It might be worth something as a collectible.”

  So that was that. That was the end of it. I went home.

  “What did you do after school today?” my mom asked when I got home.

  “I went over Zeke’s,” I told her.

  “And what did you do there?”

  “Nothin’,” I said.

  After dinner I went upstairs and stuck the cell phone and charger back in my night-table drawer. I did my homework and watched a few YouTube videos on my laptop. I was just about to drop off to sleep, when…

  Bzzzzz…bzzzzz…bzzzzz…

  I was alert immediately. I lunged for the drawer and took out the phone. The screen was lit up. There was one word on the screen.…

  “HARRY?”

  I just stared at it for a long time. I didn’t know what to do.

  “ARE YOU THERE?” it said on the screen.

  “Who is this?” I tapped.

  “IT’S ME. HOUDINI.”

  LIFE IS SHORT. DEATH IS FOREVER

  I half believed it. Who knows? Maybe it really was Houdini. Maybe he was texting me from the afterlife.

  Oh, that’s just crazy. It couldn’t be. I don’t believe in that stuff.

  I decided to humor him. That’s how detectives work, right? Maybe I could trap him and find out who he—or she—really is. But before I could send him another message…

  “WHERE WERE YOU?” appeared on my little screen. I noticed for the first time that the person who was texting me always wrote in capital letters.

  “I had to charge up the cell phone,” I tapped.

  While I waited for a reply, I plugged the phone and charger into the wall outlet so the phone would get a full charge and not run out of juice in the middle of our text conversation, the way it did last time.

  “WHAT IS A CELL PHONE?” came the reply.

  “How are you communicating with me?” I tapped. “Are you using a computer?”

  “A WHAT?”

  “A computer,” I tapped. “It’s sort of like a smart calculator.”

  “WHAT IS A CALCULATOR?”

  Oh yeah. There were no cell phones, computers, or calculators in 1926, the year Houdini died. Television didn’t even exist yet back then. If he was pranking me, this guy was good.

  “Never mind,” I tapped. “How are you communicating with me?”

  “I CANNOT EXPLAIN,” was the reply. “I JUST AM.”

  Well, that wasn’t very helpful.

  “Let me ask you this question,” I tapped. “WHY are you communicating with me?”

  “I WANT TO KNOW HOW THE WORLD HAS CHANGED SINCE MY DEATH.”

  Hmmm. I wouldn’t say that history is my best subject in school. But I know the basics, of course. I tried to think of the important events that had happened since 1926. I remembered learning that the big stock market crash was in 1929, just three years after Houdini died.

  “There was the Great Depressi
on,” I tapped, “and after that was over we had a world war.”

  “WE ALREADY HAD A WORLD WAR,” came the reply. “IN 1914. IT WAS THE WAR TO END ALL WARS.”

  “Well, we had another one,” I tapped. “We’ve had a few more, actually—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq—but they weren’t world wars. Let me see. They invented jet planes that could fly really fast, and atomic bombs that could wipe out entire cities. Oh, and we landed some guys on the moon.”

  “YOU ARE JOKING, RIGHT?”

  “No, it happened for real,” I tapped, “back in 1969. Then there was terrorism and lots of school shootings after the turn of the century. And the World Trade Center attack on 9/11.”

  “WHAT IS A WORLD TRADE CENTER?”

  Of course. The World Trade Center hadn’t been built when Houdini was alive. The Empire State Building didn’t even exist yet. It must have been a completely different New York a hundred years ago.

  “The World Trade Center was two really tall office buildings in New York City,” I tapped, trying to make things as simple as possible. “Somebody flew planes into them and knocked them down.”

  “HOW IS MY HOUSE?” he replied, changing the subject. He remembered from our last conversation that I live in his house on 113th Street. At least I knew I was texting with the same person.

  “Fine,” I tapped. “My mother takes good care of it.”

  “NOT YOUR FATHER?”

  “He died when I was a baby,” I tapped.

  “I AM SORRY. MY FATHER ALSO DIED WHEN I WAS YOUNG. TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR MOTHER. SHE IS ALL YOU HAVE.”

  I knew all about Houdini’s mother. He worshipped her. After she died, he got interested in spiritualism. He desperately wanted to communicate with his mother. But when he held séances with people who claimed to be mediums, he realized they were all con artists. That’s when he started denouncing spiritualism.

  “Have you reached your mother?” I tapped. “I mean, since you’re both dead and everything?”

  “NO. BUT HERE I AM COMMUNICATING WITH YOU. LIFE IS FUNNY THAT WAY. SO IS DEATH.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tapped, not knowing what else to say.

  “I MISS MY HOUSE,” he replied.

  He went on to describe specific things he missed about the house. Like the eight-foot mirror in the bathroom where he would rehearse his magic tricks, and the oversize sunken bathtub where he would practice holding his breath for long periods of time.