His voice trails off.
“There’s something you’re holding back,” Danny says.
“Well, I need to warn you. If the Forty-Nine are real—and your dad thought as much—then sitting at the heart of it all is someone they call Center. But we have no idea who or where that person is. He—or she—might be the one who ordered Kwan to put you in that freezer. It’s not impossible that Laura was lured to pursue this story . . . I will need to make urgent inquiries—see if the trail leads to a real threat. Or an imagined one.” He looks away toward the gathering light. “But if Center exists, we must suspect he was linked to the death of your parents. The improvised water torture and all that . . .”
At last!
“So you don’t think the fire was an accident either.”
“I have my doubts. Just never had any evidence to pursue things.”
“I knew it. I knew the police missed something.”
“But what, I wonder?” Ricard looks at him searchingly. “There’s something you aren’t telling me now, mon brave.”
“Oh, it’s nothing.” Danny shakes his head. “Nothing at all really.”
But he’s thinking about Dad’s Escape Book. He wants to get home and look at it again. See what is buried there in the code. And he’s thinking about that Khaos Klown and the smear of paint . . . My secret, he thinks. At least for now. For once I have some control over who knows what. Some power. And I want to keep it to myself.
“Can you tell me more about my dad and you? The work he did for you?”
“Not really, Danny.”
“I need to know.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t. But I can tell you that he was a good man. Very brave.”
Danny nods. He wants to ask more but can see Ricard will go no further. “Can I at least contact you if I need to?”
“Of course. Any time. Come on, forget about it for a little while. You need to recover. Look, the sun’s just about coming up.”
Laura comes in from the deck, her usual composure regained.
“Sing Sing’s taking Chow’s death awfully well. Says she’ll be OK.”
Danny nods, looking out to the deck where Sing Sing still stands, her hair flying in the wind. As if feeling his gaze, she turns and looks back at him. Smiling determinedly through her own emotion. Someone who feels like him. Someone who might just understand what he has been through. That alone makes the last few days’ nightmarish effort worthwhile. He smiles back.
“I’ll go and see if she’s OK.”
“You do that, Danny boy.”
Danny glances at his watch. The date shows 31. The thirty-first of October.
“Hey, it’s Halloween. You know what that means?”
“Trick or treat?”
“It’s the anniversary of Houdini’s death. We used to do something to mark that . . . in the old days. Dad would do something in his honor. Always.”
“Then let’s do that,” Laura says. “How about dinner—Hong Kong style?”
“I’ll see what Sing Sing wants to do. Whatever she wants is fine with me.”
He goes out onto the deck and glances back at their wake. Somewhere far behind, just over the horizon, is the place where he pulled off his desperate bid for freedom, watching the freezer falling into the limitless depths. Seems so hard to believe . . .
And it makes him think of Dad and the way his own meticulously planned version of the water torture went wrong. Much later that night—after the failed escape—Danny had sat up with him, refusing to go to bed.
At first he had felt confusion. How could Dad fail? In front of all those people? Wasn’t he the greatest living exponent of the art? If he could fail—then anyone could. So there were no guarantees in the world . . .
And they talked about that—and the fact that you have to let your mistakes teach you so that they’re not wasted. You only learn to walk the wire by falling. And that led to other things and they went on long into the night, discussing routines and tricks. Great escapes and their risks and difficulties and how even people like Houdini or great walkers like Wallenda eventually slipped up and succumbed to the inevitable. Eventually Danny said, “Why do you do it, Dad?”
“What, old son?”
“The danger. Injuries. Dislocating things. The hard work.”
“I would hope that’s obvious,” Dad said. “But I’ll spell it out for you. You’ve heard of Einstein, right?”
“Yep.”
“A genius in anyone’s book. Well, he said something like this: ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. The person who can no longer stand rapt in wonder and awe is as good as dead. Their eyes are closed.’”
He sighed. “That’s why I do it, that’s why we do it. We help to keep the mystery.”
And then he smiled broadly.
“Got to keep the mystery, Danny. Because that keeps us alive.”
Danny looks up from the memory. The sun is cracking through the clouds and Hong Kong shimmers into life before them in all its towering glory.
It’s like the most amazing conjuring trick. The world reborn.
He watches it unfold, his eyes alive with the wonder.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The story of Danny and his friends (and enemies) in the Mysterium would not have come to light without the help and support of many people.
In particular, at Hodder Children’s Books, I’d like to thank Beverley Birch for her foresight and Jon Appleton for his insight.
I’m also very grateful to my agent, Kirsty McLachlan, for helping to plant the seed of this idea and for nurturing it, and to my brother, Marcus, for his constant encouragement.
It’s not always easy living around aspiring and perspiring writers, and for that reason I give heartfelt thanks to my wife, Isabel, and my two boys—Joseph and William—for their fortitude, forbearance, and love. And for some of the better ideas in these pages.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julian Sedgwick is an author of children’s books who lives in England with his wife and two sons. Julian’s lifelong interest in the arts and culture of China and Japan has influenced much of his work, as has his fascination with performance, street art, and the circus.
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