For years, Houdini had contemplated staging just such a stunt as part of his act. Once, in California, he attempted being buried alive without a coffin, but the weight of the earth almost proved too much for him and he’d barely been able to claw his way to the surface, emerging with bleeding hands and broken fingernails. In the end, he’d abandoned the idea because he couldn’t think of how to stage it successfully. No audience would sit still staring at a sealed coffin for an hour. Nevertheless, this Ali ben Haroun business burned him up. There was no way under heaven he’d let some second-rater like Rammage steal his thunder.
Dinner went untasted, ashes in Houdini’s mouth at the thought of the phony Sufi grabbing headlines rightfully his. Bess covered for him as best she could, being long familiar with the dark depths of his brooding. After dessert and coffee, it was time for the entertainment. The magician paid no attention to the card tricks and sleights of his colleagues. He remained lost in thought until his own turn came.
Bessie joined Houdini on the makeshift stage. Vickery and Collins carried in the familiar wardrobe trunk from behind royal blue drapes. Houdini acknowledged the applause. “This little girl has been doing this illusion with me for thirty years. Since back in a Coney Island dime museum a month after we got married.” Bess blushed at the applause.
Houdini introduced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, beckoning the knight to join them onstage. He received a warm reception crossing from the dais. The magician clapped loudest of all. “We would be honored, Sir Arthur, if you consented to assist us in this endeavor.”
“The honor is mine.” The merry blue eyes sparkled with anticipated fun.
“I must ask to borrow your dinner jacket.” Houdini helped Sir Arthur shrug out of his tuxedo and slipped into it himself. Following Houdini’s instructions, Sir Arthur tied the magician’s hands behind his back. “Make it tighter. This is one occasion when a gentleman need not be so gentle.” The knight did his best, tying sailor’s knots learned during two seasons at sea as a youthful ship’s surgeon. He thought of hard men he’d known on a seven-month whaling expedition to the Arctic and later aboard a cargo schooner bound for the Gold Coast of Africa. They would have had no compunctions about binding Houdini’s wrists tight enough to cut off all circulation.
“Excellent.” The magician stepped to the front of the platform. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pleasure that I present to you the great mystery known as ‘Metamorphosis.’ “
Bess held a large canvas sack with leather straps. “A regulation United States Post Office mailbag, ladies and gentlemen.”
Houdini stepped into the sack. Bess fastened the buckles with a padlock and gave the key to Sir Arthur. At this point, the two Jims, Collins and Vickery, lifted the mail sack into the trunk, again handing Conan Doyle the key. The author locked the wardrobe and they bound it with lengths of hemp rope, wrapping it as if in a giant spiderweb.
“That should hold even Houdini for a while,” Bess quipped as the Jims placed a folding screen in front of the trunk. “And now, ladies and gentlemen … Metamorphosis! I will count to three.” She clapped her hands. “One!”
Bess stepped behind the screen. Another handclap. “Two!”
CLAP! ”Three!” This time the voice was Houdini’s. The magician emerged in his shirtsleeves, pulling the screen aside to reveal the still-bound trunk. The ballroom rang with cheering.
“Let’s have a look inside, Sir Arthur …” The two men busied themselves untying the rope from around the wardrobe. The knight first unlocked the trunk; next, the mailbag. Bess stepped smiling from the canvas sack, wrapped in Sir Arthur’s dinner jacket. She looked all the more waiflike lost in its voluminous folds, a little girl dressed up in Daddy’s clothing, and turned so the audience could see her hands securely tied behind her back. The entire Society jumped to its feet, the ballroom thunderous with applause.
Houdini untied the rope and took Bess by the hand, bowing gracefully with her, a lifetime together distilled into a single harmonious movement. Clapping enthusiastically, Sir Arthur felt awkward, sharing the stage in their moment of triumph. When the ovation subsided, the magician pulled Rammage’s handbill from his pocket. Everyone fell silent, expecting an encore. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Thank you for the kind reception. I have here a challenge from Ali ben Haroun, an Oriental master of mystery. He proposes to be buried alive for an hour in a coffin onstage and challenges me to duplicate his feat.
“Naturally, Houdini accepts! But no duplication. Houdini follows in no man’s path. In two weeks’ time, I will be sealed in a coffin and submerged beneath the surface of a swimming pool, remaining under water for a period of three hours!” The audacity of this proposal had the gathering of magicians buzzing. Sidney Rammage feigned disinterest. Houdini held up his hands for quiet.
“An impartial committee will witness this test and verify its legitimacy. Houdini never backs down from a challenge.”
11
PERCHANCE TO DREAM
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE had been in Baltimore for over forty-eight hours and still had no idea what the place looked like. He’d gone straight from the railway station to the hotel and then on to the lecture hall, with various stopovers in tea rooms and restaurants. His view of the city remained entirely interior. The past two weeks had likewise gone by in a similar blur of activity, the speaking tour taking over almost every aspect of his life. During the few days left to them in New York, Lady Jean sat up with him every morning into the dawn. No further Poe manifestation was observed.
Exhausted by the grueling schedule, Jean had been sleeping late since they resumed the tour. Ever the early riser, Conan Doyle got up in the dark and prowled the unfamiliar terrain of each successive hotel suite. Because it was his second morning in Baltimore, he knew where to avoid a barked shin. No teapot waited outside the door, in spite of specific instructions the previous evening. Sir Arthur sighed in exasperation. He greatly missed the comforts of the Plaza.
Groping for the light switch, Sir Arthur stopped dead in his tracks. There he sat. A will-o’-the-wisp casting a faint blue-green glow in the far corner of the room. “Poe…?” The knight stumbled forward, mouth agape in disbelief.
The luminous specter wavered before him, moving in and out of focus like a magic lantern image projected onto drifting smoke. Sir Arthur stopped, standing stock still in the center of the room, a hunter stalking his prey, afraid any slight motion might drive the spirit from the room. “You are indeed Poe?” the knight insisted.
The poet’s tormented eyes sought his own. What horrors had they observed? Conan Doyle recoiled inwardly at the misery embodied in so bleak a stare. Here were eyes that had seen Purgatory, and worse.
“Indeed, I am …” The manifestation spoke with unhurried languor, the sound of his words soft as footsteps in the snow. “Poor, wretched Poe …”
“I am not a ghost,” Sir Arthur said. “In spite of what you may think.”
“It matters little what I think. There you stand. If I thought you the Archangel Gabriel, it would be of no consequence. You would stand so before me all the same. Whether you be Lucifer or Ligeia or the ghost of Hamlet’s father seems but trivial speculation. The indisputable fact is your presence. Of that much I am sure, for I do not think myself mad.”
Conan Doyle’s mind raced down corridors of limitless possibilities. “I mean you no harm,” he murmured, not certain quite how to start.
“Very reassuring …”
“Do you know where you are right now?”
The specter laughed: links of rusted chain dragging up cold stone steps from the mossy depths of some forgotten cellar. “Are you lost? A poor peripatetic spirit doomed to an. eternity of wandering? Content yourself in the knowledge of inhabiting the handsomest city in the Union, fair Baltimore, home to four generations of my distinguished family.”
“It is the city where you died.” Sir Arthur couldn’t help himself. The words were out before he realized their impropriety.
“You
anticipate my obituary prematurely, or do you mean to be prophetic?”
Once again, puzzled by a ghost refusing to acknowledge its own demise, Sir Arthur felt ancient doubts welling up within him. He rubbed his eyes, as if attempting to wipe the apparition from his sight. “Don’t you remember seeing me in New York?” he asked, blinking.
“I can scarce remember New York. Such memories are painful to me. There in that cold city my beloved Sissy was taken from me forever.”
“Your wife…?”
“My life… . My soul… . The entire essence of my being! You asked if I were dead. A question more astute than you might ever realize. My life ended on the afternoon of February 2, 1847, the hour my sweet angelic Virginia was laid within the icy vault. What you see before you is but a husk, the hollow shell of one who loved and laughed and dreamed. He is no more. He is truly dead. Defunct!”
Sir Arthur felt the specter’s chilling words resonate within his spirit like the stark tolling of a death knell. A chill chime for each loss in his life; Touie, Kingsley, Innes, the Ma’am, a list of loved ones growing longer with every heartbreak. His belief in spiritism had alleviated the pain, the thought of gentle, happy shades waiting to greet him across the final divide. And here stood Poe’s ghost, lost in nothingness, trapped forever by unending tragedy, making a mockery of all he held sacred.
“Is there no hope?” Sir Arthur’s face looked old in the gray dawn light. “No hope at all…?”
The specter wavered, dissolving like mist. A bitter smile played about his thin lips. “Hope…?” His laugh came from someplace far away, the sound of childhood games fading in the evening twilight, of friends never seen again. “Hope? Pity the poor dreamer …” And he was gone.
The coffin cost $3,500. Cast from bronze, ornate and ponderous, the sort of casket Mussolini would order for his state funeral, it sat on the tiled edge of the Biltmore Hotel swimming pool, bold as an avant-garde art installation. Recent modifications included a battery-powered alarm bell and a telephone. These instruments squatted like black mechanical reptiles on the pleated white satin interior. Death in the Jazz Age.
Reflected light from the Olympic-sized pool undulated across the tiled arabesques of the Moorish ceiling. The close, humid air reeked sexually of chlorine. A crowd of reporters looked down from a viewing gallery. Their muffled wisecracks echoed in the low-vaulted space.
Official witnesses and others with special invitations clustered around the far end of the pool, where a physician took Houdini’s pulse and measured his blood pressure. The magician sat, naked to the waist, clad in just the drawers of his bathing costume. At a time when men never went without undershirts or bared their chests in public, this alone ensured him center stage. His superb physical condition prompted more than one envious jibe about vanity.
The Jims—Collins and Vickery—ran a final check on the alarm bell and telephone. Perfectionist jacks-of-all-trades, they were never satisfied until assured the equipment for the Boss’s stunts functioned without a hitch. Jim Collins had been first assistant of the troupe ever since signing on along with fellow countryman Jim Vickery back in 1912. The two were working-class English, very alike in their London slum background, sharing a bawdy cockney humor. This proved an asset in overseeing a company at times numbering thirty.
“Everything okay?” Houdini stood at their side, ready to go.
“Copacetic, Boss.” Vickery’s fish-and-chips accent put a new spin on the stale collegiate slang.
Houdini stepped into the coffin. Ever the showman and unable to resist the pull of any audience, he gestured for attention, his voice echoing in the tiled enclosure. “Medical science states this coffin contains a volume of oxygen sufficient to sustain life for five or six minutes.” The magician spotted Sidney Rammage in the gallery and focused his manic intensity upon his rival. “Recent stage burials have suggested the impossible. Houdini now gives you the impossible.”
The magician got down into the coffin. Resting on his elbows in the quilted satin, he glanced again at the gallery, straight into the eyes of Isis, her perfect oval face framed in black. Houdini sat bolt upright with a startled gasp. In her jaunty turban and sable stole, she looked as out of place next to a swimming pool as the coffin.
“Problem, Boss…?” Jim Collins knelt instantly by his side.
“I’m okay, Collins …” She smiled above him, cool and serene as a hothouse camellia. “Just remembered something.”
“You’re ghostly pale,” Collins whispered. “Take a minute and recover your breathing.”
Houdini pulled his eyes away from her stare by pure force of will. He filled his lungs with great inhalations, oxygenating his blood, at the same time seeking the calm center he inhabited when confronting danger. At this, he proved less successful. He closed his eyes and lay back in the coffin.
When he opened them again, it was dark; the lid sealed. He ignored the quick scraping sounds of Vickery and Collins caulking the outer seam, trying to concentrate on total relaxation, limiting his breathing to short, shallow sips. His mind refused to clear. Isis lingered, jade eyes and mocking smile accelerating his heartbeat. Imperative for his metabolism to slow. By sheer determination he brought his pulse under control. He felt the coffin lift and tilt.
Vickery, Collins, and two assistants lifted the Imperial casket down to three lifeguards standing in the pool. They guided it under the surface. The coffin’s near buoyancy made it easy to hold the sculpted sides level as it settled to the bottom in five feet of water. The seal held; no telltale air bubbles. Seen from the surface, distortion enhancing its rococo excesses, the coffin seemed mythic, the nautical tomb of a minor sea deity.
Enclosed inside, Houdini felt distinctly mortal. Seeing Isis out of the blue had shocked him into remembering his dreams. Not just the two jolting him up in a midnight sweat, trembling, while Bess gently snored beside him, but dozens of others, wild erotic fantasies he was ashamed to recall. Never in his life had he experienced such dreams. Not even in an adolescence awash in nocturnal emissions.
Isis appeared in these dreams, utterly dissolute, surprising him in unexpected places. Stripped naked for an escape from a nameless prison cell, he turned to find her sprawled on the narrow bunk, her bare, lissome legs spread and inviting. As he sank to the bottom of the harbor in a weighted packing case, she writhed on top of him, playfully hiding the key to his handcuffs, all the while stroking his genitals. Once, they became animals mating in the jungle. Sleek leopards dancing in mottled sunlight, all muscle and sinew; the nape of her neck caught in his curved, ivory teeth.
The telephone rang. It was Vickery. “Boss. Everything’s in place. Timing’s begun. No leaks… . Just checking in.”
“Things’re fine down here.”
“Check. Call you again in fifteen minutes.” Vickery hung up the receiver and raised his eyebrows at Collins.
“Guv’nor off on a tear, is he?” Jim Collins wiped the sweat from his smooth bald head with his handkerchief.
“Working up to one. He’s brooding on something all right.”
Collins glanced at the wavering image of the submerged coffin. “If you was him, you’d be brooding, too.”
“If I was him, I’d’ve retired before it killed me.”
Encased within the soft confines of the coffin, Houdini wrestled with his demons. Lying motionless in the utter dark, breathing lightly, his mind isolated from sensory contact, he felt hallucinations creep like shadow-rats across the edges of perception. A thousand times before, in similar enclosed situations, he kept continually busy, working through the arranged stages of the escape. He hadn’t considered the psychic effects of lying alone in darkness for an hour. No sound. No sensation.
Isis was with him, filling the tiny space with her powerful presence. Try as he might, Houdini remained unable to rid his mind of the woman. Dark hallucinatory demons swirled up around him. A flock of shrieking succubi thrashed in the blackness, flaccid breasts leaking venom, tattered wings rank with decay. They pressed in
around him. Every pale, savage face wore identical features. Green-eyed and raven-haired, they all looked exactly like Isis.
The magician could not slow his headlong descent into madness. Nothing in his experience readied him for this unexpected torment. He thought himself prepared for any emergency; a man who sat for hours in a bathtub amid floating cakes of ice to accustom his body to the cold encountered during bridge jumps and underwater escapes. Who exercised his fingers until they grew strong enough to unfasten buckles through a heavy thickness of canvas.
Unprepared for a situation over which he had no physical control, the magician felt powerless. Guts and grit were no help at all; concentration and willpower less than useless. The hallucinations refused to diminish. For the first time in his life, the magician confronted an unfamiliar emotion: the rigid, irrational beginnings of fear.
He told himself, over and over, the ragged wings sweeping across his body weren’t real. He denied the frenzied howls and wailing. Shutting his eyes didn’t help. Isis tormented him in all her many guises. Paralyzed by pure terror, Houdini surrendered as the wings folded about him; arms gathering him to her in a dank embrace. He confronted the glowing green stare. Her lips parted for a kiss. In place of her tongue, a writhing snake appeared. When the phone rang again, Houdini was screaming.
Vickery hung up the receiver, his joker’s face creased with worry. “Something’s wrong with the Boss,” he muttered to Collins. “He sounds frantic.”
“He in some trouble?”
Vickery shrugged. “Said everything was going fine.”
“What’s the problem then?”
“Don’t know there is a problem. It was just his voice. Rattling on a mile a minute. Seemed a bit weird, is all.”
“Maybe I should have a word with him.” Collins reached for the phone.
Vickery shook his head, adopting an officious demeanor. Over the years, he frequently appeared in the act as an insane asylum attendant or police detective or whatever dignitary the circumstances demanded, and he had come to assume an air of mock authority even offstage. “Not such a good idea,” he said, his voice as comically officious as Groucho Marx pretending to be a judge. “He didn’t ask for any help. There’s the alarm bell if he’s in trouble. My vote is leave him alone. What is it they say about letting sleeping dogs lie?”
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