by David Khalaf
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
HOUDINI SPED PAST Marcel, the stage manager.
“Houdini, is that you?” Marcel said, looking around. “The show is starting. Come on!”
The magician had been running for the exit, but Marcel gave him an idea.
The stage.
Houdini stopped in his tracks and turned sharply left. He stuffed the gold chain into his pants pocket and jumped up the five steps onto the stage behind the curtain. A live orchestra was finishing the last few bars of “Charleston,” the song meant to cue him on. The curtains burst open: spotlights blinded the magician and applause deafened him. This was typically his element, but right now the external stimulation made it difficult to think.
I have to buy as much time as possible.
The applause died as people looked around at the seemingly empty stage. Houdini slipped off the Ring of the Fisherman and suddenly appeared. There were gasps and then more applause.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said as loudly as possible, “thank you for coming. Merci.”
Atlas stormed onto the stage, every footstep cracking the wooden floor below.
“Tonight we have a special guest—a strongman!”
Atlas eyed the crowd uncomfortably. This was what Houdini had hoped for. Enough uncertainty to make the giant man pause.
“Magic is the art of manipulating the eye. A good magician directs the audience where to look. And where not to.”
Houdini stepped toward Atlas, who cocked his arm. The magician slipped on the ring and ducked just as Atlas took a wild swing at him. Gasps and applause from the crowd.
“In this way, magic is much like life,” Houdini said, sneaking quietly across the stage toward a table of handcuffs. He knew people had a sense of him on stage, but they couldn’t quite get their eyes to look in the right place.
“People will distract you, trying to get you to look one way when, really, you should be looking another.”
He picked up a pair of handcuffs, which to the audience must have appeared to be levitating. Atlas ran for the table and smashed it in half with one fist. Houdini quietly stepped out of the way.
“If there’s one escape I could teach you, it would be to escape what the world tells you is important, and instead look for what really matters.”
At the back of the audience, Houdini saw two figures, barely more than shadows, sneaking their way toward the front door. He instantly recognized the outline of Bess in front, guiding Pickford with a sleepy little lump against her chest.
“Ask yourself, what is worth dying for? Your work? Your status? Your wealth? All of those things die off when you do, maybe sooner.”
Bess and Pickford stopped a moment to watch the stage.
Run, my dear wife! Run and call the police!
“I never believed in the supernatural, but I now believe there is magic. Magic in the love of friends and family. Magic in what you would do to protect them. When your love for someone transforms them for the better, it’s the greatest magic in the world.”
Atlas lunged toward Houdini’s voice, quicker than the magician expected. Houdini jumped to escape him, but Atlas’s hand clipped his shoulder. Houdini landed hard, and the ring came tumbling off his finger. It bounced and then rolled to the front edge of the stage, about to fall into the orchestra pit.
The giant man grabbed Houdini by the front of the shirt and pulled him to his feet.
“There is no power in magic,” Atlas said. “But power itself is rather magical.”
He pulled Houdini close to him.
“I’ve heard you brag that you can withstand the punch of any man,” Atlas said. “Is that true?”
Before Houdini could react Atlas walloped him in the stomach with massive force. Houdini flew across the stage and crashed into a stone column at the far end. Sharp, burning pain shot up and down his body. For a moment he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t even think about anything except the fiery bolts of pain.
Houdini grabbed the decorative ridges in the column and pulled himself to standing.
“It’s true,” he said, coughing up blood. “Only you didn’t give me the chance to brace myself.”
Houdini took a rasping breath and looked inward. Three of his vertebra were fractured and the nerves going to one of his legs were damaged. There was a soft, squishy mass above his bladder that he had trouble identifying until he realized it was what remained of his appendix. His pancreas had been bruised and a section of his small intestine had been severed clean in half. Houdini gingerly touched a bulge that was forming to the side of his belly button. There was massive internal bleeding.
In short, I am dying.
He collapsed onto his hands and knees. Somewhere in the far reaches of his mind, he heard people in the audience murmuring to themselves in concern. His head was spinning with nausea and the corners of his sight had gone dark. Through his blurry vision, he saw the Ring of the Fisherman, teetering on the front edge of the stage.
A voice came to him. Calamity Jane. She had said something to Houdini so many years ago. What was it?
Men would kill for talent like yours. Don’t you ever let them.
Why it was so important, Houdini didn’t know. He pulled the gold chain from his pocket and bunched it into a ball.
“You win, Atlas,” he said.
He stood, and with as much strength as he could muster, he threw the chain into the dark recesses of the back stage. Atlas scrambled for it.
Houdini stumbled over to the ring. He flipped open the cap and pulled out the white tablet Pope Benedict had told him about. He stuck it on his tongue. It was unbearably bitter, but he forced himself to swallow.
Dark must die.
He didn’t know what the chemical was, but he could tell it was powerful, and that it would work quickly to finish him—much faster than Atlas’s blow to his stomach. The ring tumbled from his grasp and clattered into the orchestra pit.
When Houdini looked up, he saw that Bess and Pickford were gone. They were safe. He had bought them enough time to escape. There was a faint sound of sirens in the distance. Houdini doubted the police could subdue Atlas, but they would delay him even further. They would buy more time.
Once Atlas discovered Houdini’s ruse, would he chase Mary Pickford down, or was her identity still safe? And what would she do with the boy? If the giant man continued to hunt her, it would be too dangerous to have him with her. He could only imagine how Atlas might use him, what his unexplainable power might do for the other Burdens. Pickford needed to send him away. But could she bear to part with him?
As he observed his dying pulse pumping the poison through his body, he noticed his son’s strange drop of blood still inside him. His body had not absorbed it; rather, it resided there, comfortable and self-sustained, as if it were its own entity.
Houdini focused all of his gift on that one drop, every last bit of energy he had.
I love you, my son. The sacrifice is worth it.
He held onto that drop in his mind, cradling it as if it were the boy itself. There was a calmness in knowing there was nothing left for Houdini to do but die. He had done his job. He had left his magic to the world. And he had discovered his true legacy.
—THE END—
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