Houdini and Me

by Dan Gutman

  The lock opened a cabinet. There was only one thing inside the cabinet—a flashlight. But it wasn’t a regular flashlight. It was a black-light flashlight. When we turned off the lights and shined the flashlight at the wall, a bunch of letters appeared there that couldn’t be seen in the regular light. That letter code opened up another lock.

  You had to solve a bunch of puzzles like that in a specific order to get out of the room. There was a timer on the wall that counted down to tell us how much time we had left.

  I won’t bore you with all the details. The words we saw on the wall didn’t make any sense, but we noticed that the first letter of each one spelled “skoob.” That’s where we got stuck.

  The puzzles were really hard. When the timer clicked down to ten minutes and we still had a few clues to solve, we knew we weren’t going to get out of the room. We were stumped.

  The whole thing was exhausting for me, because there was no place to sit and I hadn’t done a lot of standing in a long time. It was still fun anyway. When the timer buzzed, the door opened and one of the employees came in to “rescue” us.

  “What does the word skoob mean?” I asked her.

  “Sorry, but I’m not allowed tell you the answers to the clues,” she replied. “Come back and try again sometime.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  She told us not to feel bad, because most people don’t figure out how to escape from the room. She gave us discount coupons for a return visit.

  Afterward, Zeke’s parents took us all out for dinner at this place that makes amazing ice-cream sundaes.

  It had been a long day for me, and I fell into bed early. I tried to read a little bit from my science book for school, but felt my eyelids closing. So I turned off my light and pulled my covers up around me. That’s when I heard a soft buzzing sound.

  Bzzzzz…bzzzzz…bzzzzz…

  What’s that? It sounded very close, like it was in my room. I flipped the light back on and looked around. The buzzing sound seemed to be coming from my night table.

  I opened the drawer.

  The cell phone I had stashed in there was vibrating!

  I flipped it open.

  These words were on the screen…

  “YOU COULD HAVE ESCAPED.”

  That was it. Huh! The phone actually works, I thought to myself. But I figured it had to be a prank.

  “Who is this?” I whispered. I didn’t want my mom to hear me from her bedroom. “Zeke?”

  There was no response.

  Of course not, I thought, slapping myself in the forehead. It was a text, not a call. The phone didn’t work as a phone, but it could transmit texts. Or it could receive them, anyway.

  “Who is this?” I tapped clumsily on the little keypad, making a few typos along the way and correcting them.

  There was no response.

  “Is this you, Zeke?” I tapped.

  Nothing.

  It was probably the escape room place, I figured. They were taunting me. I’ll bet they send that text out to everybody who doesn’t escape so they’ll come back and try again. Zeke must have gotten the same message. I made a mental note to ask him about it at school the next day.

  I put the flip phone back in the drawer and lay there with my hands behind my head. It was hard to sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking. How did anybody get that number to send the text? And why would they be sending a text to this random phone in the first place? I never gave them a number. I didn’t even know the number myself.

  These thoughts were going around and around in my brain. And one more: Who left the box with a flip phone in my hospital room? And why?

  For a moment, I considered getting up and going to tell my mom what was going on. But then I thought the better of it. If she knew I had a phone and that it worked, even just to receive texts, she’d probably take it away from me.

  I rolled over and was almost asleep when…

  Bzzzzz…bzzzzz…bzzzzz…

  I turned on the light, opened the drawer, and took out the cell phone again.

  “YOU SHOULD HAVE ESCAPED.”

  It had to be Zeke, messing with me. He must have been the one who sent the old cell phone to my hospital room, as a joke. That guy cracks me up.

  “How could I have escaped?” I tapped.

  A few seconds passed, and then this appeared on the screen.…

  “SKOOB IS BOOKS BACKWARD. THERE WAS A BOOKSHELF ON THE WALL.”

  “So?” I tapped.

  “ONE OF THE BOOKS HAD A KEY INSIDE. IT WOULD HAVE OPENED THE DESK DRAWER.”

  Of course! It was so simple! They probably cut out the center of the book’s pages to hide the key. We should have been able to figure that out when we were in the escape room. The solution was right under our noses. Zeke must have been thinking about it all night.

  “How do you know that?” I tapped.

  A few more seconds passed, and then this appeared on the screen.…

  “LET’S JUST SAY I’M GOOD AT ESCAPING FROM THINGS.”

  “Pretty smart, Zeke,” I tapped.

  “IT’S NOT ZEKE,” my screen said.

  “Then who are you?” I tapped.

  Three dots appeared on the screen, and they were there for a long time, which suggested that he—or she—was writing a long reply. Finally the dots disappeared. I was a little more than surprised when they were replaced by just one word:

  “HOUDINI.”

  THE GREAT MYSTERY

  Okay, now I was sure I was being pranked.

  Zeke is always pulling crazy stuff like this. He likes to mess with people, especially me. He’ll put toothpaste in your Oreos or cotton balls in your sneakers just for laughs. One time he told me the next day was going to be “Pajama Day” and everybody was going to wear pajamas to school. So I wore my pajamas. But when I got to school, I was the only kid wearing pajamas! I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive Zeke for that one.

  It was like putting the coins on the train tracks. Zeke likes to do weird stuff that most other people wouldn’t think of doing. Not bad stuff, mind you. He doesn’t break the law or intentionally hurt anybody. He just likes to do weird stuff. That’s the way his brain works, I guess.

  I was staring at the word “HOUDINI” on the phone screen when it was replaced by another text.…

  “THE ESCAPE ROOM WAS A PIECE OF CAKE. ANYBODY SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO GET OUT.”

  “Knock it off, Zeke,” I tapped on the phone. “It’s not funny.”

  “I AM NOT ZEKE,” appeared on my screen after a few seconds. “I AM HARRY HOUDINI.”

  I knew that was a lie. Harry Houdini died way back in 1926. Zeke didn’t know the story of how it happened, but I did. I had read all about it.

  If you’ve ever heard anybody say that Houdini died from a punch in the stomach, it’s basically true. Here’s what happened:

  Houdini was doing a bunch of shows in the fall of 1926. During a show in Albany, New York, he was about to perform his famous Water Torture Cell trick when a wire twisted and he fractured his left ankle. Houdini took pride in not giving in to pain, so the show went on. (In fact, when he wanted to prove how tough he was, Houdini would sometimes stick a needle through his cheek.)

  Despite the broken ankle, he struggled through two shows in Albany, then did a show in Schenectady, and after that it was on to Montreal, limping the whole time.

  On October 22, during the afternoon before his show, Houdini gave a talk at McGill University. During the talk, one of the students drew a sketch of him. Houdini was impressed, and invited the student to come to the theater where he was performing the next day to draw another one for his collection.

  While Houdini was lying down on a couch posing for his picture, another student knocked on the dressing-room door. His name was J. Gordon Whitehead. They talked about various subjects, and then Whitehead suddenly asked, “Is it true, Mr. Houdini, that you can resist the hardest blows struck to the abdomen?”

  Houdini played along, letting Whitehead feel the muscles in
his arms.

  “Would you mind if I delivered a few blows to your abdomen, Mr. Houdini?” Whitehead asked.

  Houdini said it was okay. He was lying on a couch, remember, because of his broken ankle. Suddenly, without giving Houdini a chance to tense up his muscles and get ready, Whitehead punched him four or five times in the stomach. Whitehead was a big man, and he hit Houdini as hard as he could.

  Houdini took the blows, but was in serious pain afterward. At his show the next night, he was sweating and had to lie down during intermission. After the show, he couldn’t dress himself. He was in too much pain.

  Detroit was the next stop on the tour. When he arrived, Houdini had a temperature of 102 degrees. A doctor was called, and he said that Houdini had acute appendicitis. Houdini insisted on doing his show anyway, although his temperature was now at 104. He struggled through the performance, and collapsed at the end.

  He was taken to the hospital and rushed into surgery. Doctors removed his appendix, which had ruptured. He felt a little better, but then Houdini took a turn for the worse. Poison from his appendix had seeped into his intestines. Another operation had to be performed.

  It didn’t work. Houdini died that Sunday—Halloween—at Grace Hospital in Detroit. His last words were “I can’t fight anymore.” He was just fifty-two years old.

  “Houdini is dead,” I tapped on the little keypad.

  The reply came quickly. It was just two letters.…

  “SO?”

  I thought that was all, but then a torrent of words scrolled up my little screen.…

  “WHEN WE DIE, ONLY OUR PHYSICAL BODY DIES. THE SPIRIT SURVIVES.”

  What?!

  “DEATH IS NOT THE END OF LIFE. IT IS JUST A CHANGE IN LIFE. LIKE A CATERPILLAR TURNING INTO A BUTTERFLY.”

  Wow. This was a pretty elaborate prank somebody was pulling on me. Whoever was behind it had put some thought and effort into it.

  “So you’re claiming,” I tapped, “that the dead can communicate with the living. And you’re dead?”

  “CORRECT,” was the reply. “WE EXIST IN PARALLEL WORLDS.”

  Oh yeah, spiritualism—the belief that the dead can communicate with the living. All the books I’ve read about Houdini talk about spiritualism. It was an up-and-coming religion in Houdini’s day. Spiritualists believed that the world was made of two substances, matter and spirit. We can see and feel matter, but spirit is invisible. It can’t be perceived through our senses.

  It all began in 1848 with three sisters named Fox. They claimed to hear mysterious knocking noises made by spirits who haunted their home in Hydesville, New York. Word got around, and soon the Fox sisters were celebrities, giving demonstrations before big crowds and making lots of money. They confessed they were faking it all in 1888, but by then hundreds of spiritualists had popped up all over the country, claiming to be able to reunite grieving people with their dead relatives.

  Spiritualism was really popular around 1920, after so many soldiers had been killed in World War I and millions of people had died in a flu epidemic. In Houdini’s day, it was the phony mediums and fortune-tellers who served as “voices from the spirit world.” Now it looked like those same kinds of fakers were doing it with cell phones. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

  The thing is, Houdini hated spiritualism. He saw how fake mediums—using tricks just like those used by magicians—would take money from grief-stricken people. He actually spent the last few years of his life trying to expose fraudulent spiritualists.

  “You can’t be Houdini,” I tapped. “He didn’t believe in spiritualism.”

  “LET’S JUST SAY THAT BEING DEAD HAS A WAY OF CHANGING ONE’S MIND.”

  I will admit one thing. If anybody could come back from the grave and communicate with the living, it would be Harry Houdini. He said so himself before he died. He used to make arrangements with his friends saying that whichever one of them “punctured the veil of death” first would try to contact the other. Houdini called it “the great mystery.”

  “I AM ON THE OTHER SIDE NOW,” it said on my screen.

  Look, I’m no dummy. There are a lot of scammers out there, and I wasn’t going to fall for this one. It was only a matter of time before this “Houdini” character—whoever he was—would ask me to send money. Scam artists are always trying to rip you off.

  “I don’t believe you,” I tapped.

  There was a long pause. I thought I had heard the last of him. He would just hang up and move on to the next number on his list, hoping to find a sucker. But then another torrent of words scrolled up my screen.…

  “I WAS BORN ON MARCH 24TH, 1874. IN BUDAPEST, HUNGARY. ONE OF SEVEN BROTHERS & SISTERS. CAME TO U.S. AND SETTLED IN WISCONSIN. I RAN AWAY FROM HOME AT 12. MARRIED BESS RAYMOND. STARTED DOING HANDCUFF ESCAPES IN 1895.”

  The phantom texter was rattling off Houdini’s biography, as if I didn’t already know it. He said he was known as “The King of Handcuffs” by 1899, and a couple of years later he had become one of the most famous men in the world. He claimed to have escaped from drowning two thousand times. He got out of 12,500 straitjackets and opened 8,300 padlocks. Along the way, he singlehandedly created an entire form of entertainment—the escape artist.

  “WHAT MORE CAN I TELL YOU?” he texted. “I AM HOUDINI!”

  I still wasn’t impressed.

  “You could have learned all that stuff from Wikipedia,” I tapped.

  “WIKI WHAT?” came back. “IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME, ASK ME SOMETHING THAT ONLY THE REAL HARRY HOUDINI WOULD KNOW.”

  Hmmmm. Well, he asked for it. I know a lot about Houdini.

  “What did you have in your hand your whole life?” I tapped.

  “A BULLET,” he texted back right away. “I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT WITH SOME GAMBLERS WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN, AND ONE OF THEM SHOT ME. THE DOCTORS COULDN’T REMOVE THE BULLET.”

  That was an easy one. I tried to think of something that hardly anybody knows about Houdini.

  “After the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, you became a pilot,” I tapped. “What was your biggest accomplishment in that area?

  “I WAS THE FIRST PERSON TO FLY A PLANE IN AUSTRALIA,” he texted back.

  Wow, that was right! But I still wasn’t convinced. Far from it. Anybody could claim to be anybody in a text. That’s why we’re told to be careful when we communicate with people online. Zeke didn’t know all that stuff about Houdini. So it couldn’t be him. But maybe it was some Houdini expert who was pranking me. Maybe it was one of those guys who wrote a book about Houdini. We had a whole shelf of them in the living room downstairs.

  Or maybe it was some magician who is obsessed with Houdini. Magicians are in the business of deception. Their job is to mislead people. Maybe he’s misleading me. I wasn’t going to fall for it. It could be anybody.

  “Those questions are all easily Googleable,” I tapped.

  “GOOGLEABLE?”

  Oh sure, it made perfect sense for him to pretend he never heard of Google. The real Houdini wouldn’t know anything about stuff that took place after 1926.

  Then it hit me. I would ask him about something that’s not on Google. Information that isn’t available anywhere. I would ask him the secrets of his magic.

  “How did you do the East Indian Needle Trick?” I tapped.

  The East Indian Needle Trick was one of Houdini’s strangest and most amazing stunts. He would take a hundred needles and put them in his mouth. Then he would put twenty yards of thread in his mouth. Then he would drink from a glass of water to “swallow” it all. A few seconds later, he would reach into his mouth and pull out the thread—with the needles attached to it, each needle a few inches apart!

  It was simply amazing. And Houdini did a similar trick using razor blades. I always wondered how he did it.

  It didn’t take long for a reply to come back:

  “I HID A THREADED SET OF NEEDLES BETWEEN MY UPPER GUM AND CHEEKS THE WHOLE TIME,” he explained. “AFTER I PULLED IT OUT OF MY M
OUTH, I WOULD GET RID OF THE OTHER NEEDLES IN THE GLASS OF WATER AND MY ASSISTANT WOULD TAKE IT AWAY.”

  Of course! I should have been able to figure that out.

  “What about walking through walls?” I tapped. “How did you do that?”

  It was another Houdini classic. A team of bricklayers would come up on stage and actually build a brick wall while the audience watched. Houdini would be on one side of the wall. Then a curtain would be placed in front, and Houdini would magically appear on the other side of the wall.

  “THERE WAS A TRAP DOOR IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STAGE,” came the reply. “WHEN IT WAS OPENED, THE CARPET SAGGED JUST ENOUGH FOR ME TO SQUEEZE UNDER THE WALL AND COME UP ON THE OTHER SIDE.”

  Wow. Whoever this guy really was, he sure knew his stuff.

  “What about the trunk escape?” I tapped. “How did you pull that off?”

  The trunk escape was one of Houdini’s most famous tricks. That’s the one in which he would be locked up in chains and put inside a large trunk. The trunk would be nailed shut with dozens of nails, and then dropped into a river. People would line the banks, freaking out while it seemed like Houdini was drowning. A minute or two later, he would bob to the surface, smiling and free of the chains.

  “SIMPLE,” was the reply. “THE TRUNK HAD A HIDDEN PANEL HELD ON BY TWO SHORT NAILS. I WOULD GET OUT OF THE CHAINS WHILE THE TRUNK WAS NAILED SHUT AND THEN PUSH OUT THE TRICK PANEL UNDERWATER.”

  “Yeah, but how did you get out of the handcuffs and chains when you were locked in the trunk?” I tapped.

  “THERE ARE A MILLION WAYS,” he texted back. “IF YOU HIT MOST HANDCUFFS ON A HARD SERVICE, THEY WILL OPEN. IF THAT DIDN’T WORK, I WOULD PICK THE LOCK WITH A SHOESTRING, HAIRPIN, PAPER CLIP, OR PIANO WIRE.”

  I knew very well that before an escape, Houdini would invite people to come up on stage to look him over carefully to make sure he wasn’t hiding anything he might use to pick a lock. Sometimes they even had a doctor examine him.