by Marty Chan
Acknowledgements
A hearty round of applause to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, and Edmonton Public Library for the support of my first draft. Bravo to the Edmowrimos for the word wars that helped me write a zero draft. And a standing ovation to the kind people who pointed the way to the finish line. Thanks to Christie Harkin, Brad Smilanich, Wei Wong, Stephen Tsang, Tanya Montini, Daniel Choi, Suzanne Del Rizzo, Tom Meyers, Greg Young, and the library staff at the New-York Historical Society.
For Michelle and Ben
From Nov. 1, 1926 Detroit Record
Magician Takes Secrets to Grave
Detroit, Nov. 1 – Harry Houdini’s mysterious feats of escape, which thrilled spectators throughout his illustrious career, today were overshadowed by the mystery of his untimely death. He passed away at Detroit’s Grace Hospital last night, taking with him the secrets of how he escaped from manacles, chains, coffins, straitjackets and other contrivances.
Although Houdini wrote copiously on magic, his own methods were never revealed, nor have they ever been duplicated by any of his contemporaries, thus setting him apart as the world’s greatest magician. Later in life, he gained a reputation for exposing charlatans posing as mediums, which earned him a few detractors in the world of spiritualism.
Houdini is believed to have perished as a result of a ruptured appendix, but the exact circumstances of Houdini’s death are currently unknown.
An Unexpected Entry
Any other time he could spring a lock, but this one refused to open. Maybe the dim lighting in the unfamiliar hallway made it hard to see. Perhaps the sweat on his hands caused his hook pick to shift and prevented the lock pins from lifting. Maybe he was crumbling under the pressure of his first live performance in front of his kid brother. Whatever the reason, Ehrich Weisz could not still the tension wrench in his trembling hand.
“We should leave,” Dash whispered, nervously scratching under the waistband of his knickerbockers.
“Just keep watch,” Ehrich said. A Hungarian accent clung to his speech like caked mud on the side of a boot, not yet ready to fall off.
“We don’t need to do this. I can tell Momma my cap fell in the river.”
“Dash, you know her. She will wonder why we were near the Fox in the first place. Besides, if you let Gregor take your hat today, he is going to take something else from you tomorrow.”
The ten-year-old boy’s thick eyebrows furrowed like the wings of a crow in mid-flight. “Why do you not tell him to give it back?”
In 1888 America, one did not get anything by asking; instead, you had to take what you wanted. The problem was that Gregor had four years on the twelve-year-old Ehrich; plus, he outweighed both Weisz brothers combined. If Ehrich could challenge him to a tumbling contest, maybe he’d have a chance, but flying fists beat backflips every time. The solution was to take something Gregor cared about—something Ehrich could offer as a trade—and he knew what to steal: Gregor’s prized clay marbles. The German teen had amassed quite the collection over the last year, mostly by intimidating weak-kneed players into forfeiting their marbles. The games reminded Ehrich how the husky boy dominated the neighbourhood. Every kid was a marble, and it was only a matter of time before Gregor knocked him out of the circle. Dash had bested the bully, and the enraged teen accused his brother of cheating, then confiscated his hat.
Ehrich wiped his sweaty cheek against the shoulder of his sack jacket and redoubled his efforts on the lock. The hook pick slid deeper as a pin lifted. A bead of sweat rolled down his anchor-like nose as he turned the tension wrench. Click!
“I’m in,” he whispered, barely able to disguise his glee.
But he wasn’t the one who opened the door. A burly man with more hair than flesh stood in the doorway, his rotund belly spilling over the waistband of his wool trousers.
“Who are you?” Gregor’s father bellowed.
Ehrich shoved his brother back down the hall. “Run!”
“Damn kids. Come back here!”
The Weisz brothers scrambled down the steps and burst out of the apartment building. Ehrich sprinted ahead along the wooden sidewalk, ducking between well-groomed men in frocks and coifed women in Dolman cloaks.
“Wait! Wait for me!” Dash screamed.
Ehrich grabbed his brother’s arm and yanked him around the corner. The heavyset man shouted, “Little brats! I’ll tan your hides until you can’t sit for a week!”
Ehrich dodged oncoming horse carriages to cross the wide muddy road. Dash gasped for air, unable to run any further.
“Hide!” Ehrich ordered.
“What about you?”
“Whatever you do, do not come out until I find you.” He shoved his little brother behind a pile of trash and then sprinted in the opposite direction, drawing Gregor’s father after him.
The angry man barrelled right past Dash. The young boy wiped the sweat from his bushy eyebrows as he searched for a better, less smelly, hiding place. Halfway down the block, a narrow alleyway seemed a likely sanctuary. Dash scanned the area for Nosy Nellies. None of the crowd cared about him; they were more interested in the chase. He ducked into the alley and threaded past barrels and crates. A man’s leg twitched on the other side of a wooden box. Dash stiffened.
“Is anybody there? Hello?”
A man with a golden handlebar moustache sat against the brick wall, his head listing. His twitching foot repeatedly kicked the wooden crate. Sulphur lingered in the air.
“Are you all right, sir?” Dash asked, covering his nose.
The man lifted his head. Only the whites of his eyes gazed out. The stench of sulphur grew stronger. Soft hands grabbed Dash from behind. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out.
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Ehrich yelped. Gregor’s father had a firm grip of his ear. “Where’s the other brat?”
“Ow! Let go! Ow!”
“Not until I find a copper.”
A thrashing, Ehrich could handle, but jail time? No way. His parents would be furious.
“Help!” he cried out. “He’s trying to kidnap me!”
The husky man stiffened and loosened his grip as he noticed the boy’s conniption fit had attracted curious bystanders. This distraction was all Ehrich needed to slip out of the man’s meaty grasp and bolt across the street. He vaulted over a hitching post. Gregor’s father continued the chase, but he took a wide berth around a crowd of stern men deciding whether or not to act. Ehrich rounded a corner and slammed into a rain barrel, almost winding himself. His pursuer sounded like he was almost upon him.
No time to think, Ehrich doffed his cap, climbed into the half-full barrel and dunked his entire body in the cold water. He contorted himself into a tight ball so that he was entirely submerged. A strong swimmer, he could hold his breath, but not indefinitely. He heard the distorted echo of approaching footsteps on the wooden sidewalk. They stopped near him. Silence.
Ehrich puffed his cheeks, forcing his lungs to use the little oxygen he had left. His neck strained and his chest burned. Had Gregor’s father discovered him? He counted to distract himself from the pain. “One… two… three… four…” He mentally screamed, “Land sakes! Keep walking! No one here. Eight… nine… ten… elev—”
Finally, the footsteps moved away. Ehrich shot out of the water, gasping. He peered over the rain barrel’s rim. No sign of Gregor’s father. He climbed out as a prim woman in a Zouave jacket scurried past and stared. Ever the showman, Ehrich swept his soaking cap back with a flourish as he took a bow. The dark-haired lady huffed in disdain. Grinning, Ehrich set off in search of Dash.
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Ehrich jogged briskly, leaving a trail o
f water behind him. A flicker of movement to the left—the younger Weisz was scurrying down a street, heading away from the crowds.
“Dash?”
The boy didn’t respond.
“Dash! Where are you going?”
Nothing. Was his brother mad at him for leaving him alone? Was he going home to tell their mother? Ehrich quickened his pace but slowed when Dash headed to the outskirts of town. He followed until he recognized their destination—the cemetery. Here in this desolate field, the only life was a few scraggly elms clinging to the last of their sparse autumn covering.
Ehrich started after his brother, but stopped when he heard footsteps pounding behind him. Had Gregor’s father caught up? He couldn’t take the chance and veered off to the right to misdirect the unseen pursuer. He angled away from the cemetery and back toward the buildings, picking up the pace as he ducked into an alley. He glanced back and saw no one. Maybe his imagination had played tricks on him. He started to move, but froze when he saw Gregor’s father turn the corner. Ehrich ducked behind a pile of boxes and inched away, slipping deeper into the neighbourhood. He navigated a maze of streets and stopped at the corner of an apartment building. He waited for a few minutes until he was sure he’d given Gregor’s father the slip, then he returned to the graveyard.
Ehrich reached the edge of the cemetery and heard a low hum. He moved past the grave markers toward the source until he saw his brother. In the middle of the graveyard, Dash had set up a bizarre contraption that looked like the skeletal frame of a tepee without the buffalo hide. A Medusa’s head of wires sprouted from a large copper box at the base of the pole. Azure tendrils of plasma energy lazily swirled around the cylinder and rotor blades spun until they were perpendicular to the ground. The loud whine grew louder until Ehrich had to cover his ears.
A slit appeared in the heart of the tube. The glowing opening widened slowly like a cat’s eye.
To Ehrich’s astonishment, the horizon of a blood red sky dawned in the newly formed gateway. Giant sentinels in iron armour lined the parapets of a walled city. Brass gate doors loomed in the foreground. Dash stood up and stepped toward the shimmering portal.
Ehrich finally found his voice. “Dash! What are you doing?”
The whirring blades drowned him out. He ran across the cemetery and tackled Dash before his brother could step through. They fell to the ground in an explosion of autumn leaves. Ehrich rolled against the base of the machine and jarred it. New images appeared in the gateway.
Dash scrambled across the ground and head-butted his big brother, knocking him away from the contraption. Dazed, the older Weisz tried to stand, but a swift foot caught him in the midsection, sending him rolling across the grass until his back slammed against a wooden grave marker. Crack!
Dash knelt over the control box. Ehrich scrambled to his feet and tackled the small boy, throwing him off balance. They both flew into the maw of the rift in space. Ehrich’s brain seemed to separate from his skull. He couldn’t tell if he was falling or standing; instead, he felt as if he was floating in the ocean and plummeting from a tree at the same time. A kaleidoscope of images rushed past him: a building that hung from the bottom of a cloud, a beach where a fish wobbled on hairy legs, a giant bronze torch in the hands of the massive statue of a woman.
Then, just as suddenly as they appeared, the images were gone and Ehrich slammed into the device’s centre pole, toppling it. He skidded across a cobblestone street with Dash on top of his chest. The rotors sliced into the uneven ground, shattering against the stone; one of the shards missing Ehrich’s head by inches. As Dash rose to his feet, Ehrich clutched frantically at the front of his brother’s shirt, tearing at the collar, but a body slammed into his back, knocking him to the ground.
Shouts of angry Irish fighters rang in the air, punctuated with screams of pain. They were clearly in the middle of a Five-Points donnybrook. Ehrich spotted at least three bodies lying in the mud with knife wounds. Around him, tenement buildings blocked out the light and what little sky that was left had been blotted out by black smoke.
Dash wrenched himself out of his brother’s grasp and ran into the melee. Ehrich tried to climb to his feet, but his legs wobbled. When he found his balance, he spotted the younger boy sprinting across the street toward the outer ring of fighters where a man with mutton-chop sideburns and a bloodied white shirt brandished a wicked knife at another man with a torn white undershirt. As Dash glanced behind him, he unwittingly stepped between the combatants and into the path of the thrusting blade. Too late, the two fighters reeled back as Dash lurched to a sudden stop. The small boy clutched the blade in his gut and staggered two steps before he collapsed.
“Dash! No!” Ehrich stepped dazedly onto the street as two black stallions pulling an oncoming coach reared up, one of them clipping Ehrich’s temple and sending him sprawling across the road. As he was losing consciousness, he witnessed the carriage careen over. Then he passed out.
When he came to, the fighting had stopped. Amid the groans of the survivors, comrades dragged the bloody bodies of their fallen friends away. Ehrich sat up groggily and scanned the square for Dash but found no sign of him. He felt something pressing into his palm—a shred of his brother’s shirt and a medallion hooked on a broken leather strap.
Two gear wheels soldered together to form a figure-eight. Inside the twin loops, smaller gears connected to each other, getting smaller and smaller as if they could extend to infinity. An image of a lion with the head of a goat on its shoulders and a snake for a tail was engraved on the medallion’s back cover. What the Chimera meant, where Dash had gotten this strange medallion from, and why he had been wearing it around his neck, Ehrich had no idea.
Mr. Sandman Strikes
Sleep was the young boy’s enemy. He refused to lie down, despite his mother’s best efforts.
“Mother, something comes at night. I don’t know what it is, but I think it wants to hurt me,” he whispered.
“Such an imagination.” She tousled the boy’s curly blond locks. “Aren’t you tuckered out yet?”
“I’m sure there’s a creature in my room.” He stared at the lacquered cabinet in the corner. The gilded design resembled snakes climbing to the top. “Sometimes, I hear it knocking.”
She drew the soft cotton quilt up to his chin. “That’s the house settling.”
“No, the monster lives in the cabinet. It wants to eat me.”
“Shh, shh, time to sleep.” She turned down the oil reservoir valve on the astral lamp, but he grabbed her wrist.
“Please leave the light on,” he begged.
She caressed his chubby cheek. “You know what you need? A bedtime story.”
He burrowed the back of his head into the pillow. “Yes! Read me a little more from that book. The Prince and the Pauper.”
“The book’s downstairs. Why don’t I tell you a tale about a man who guides children to a magical realm where dreams come true?”
“Who is he?”
“Mr. Sandman. You can tell it’s him by his bag of sleeping dust. He blows the fine bits of dust into children’s eyes to make their eyelids heavy, and when they fall asleep, he transports them to a train which travels on moonbeam tracks all the way to Slumber.”
“Do you think he’s in the cabinet?” The boy began to sit up.
She pressed him back to the pillow. “No, but he’s on his way. If you’re asleep when he comes, he’ll put you in the car near the front of the train.”
He nestled into the bed.
“Please, leave the lamp on so Mr. Sandman can find me.”
She sighed and adjusted the valve to brighten the room just a bit. Then she kissed her son’s forehead and walked out. She stopped at the doorway. “Good ni—”
A slight, high-pitched whistle cut her off. In the hallway, a tall man in a raggedy black suit stood a few feet away. Under his stovetop hat, his mottled face resembled a calico cat’s colouring. The whistling came from his sickle-shaped nose as he sucked in air.
He raised a metal claw-like hand to his lips and blew dust into her eyes.
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In the bedroom, the cherubic boy watched in horror as his mother slumped to the floor. Standing over her, the raggedy man in the tattered suit bent over her face and plucked a small orb. He deposited the bloody ball into the satchel at his hip then he touched the woman’s face again.
“M-m-mother,” the boy stammered.
Her body jerked in the hallway as the creature looked up and ogled the boy, his dappled face illuminated by the bedside lamp’s dim light. He flashed a crooked smile, his yellow teeth stalagmites in a fetid cave.
“M-M-Mister Sandman?”
“No, fles-s-sh bag,” the raggedy man said, his sibilant speech scratching at the boy’s ears. “Ole Lukoje won’t be here long. All I want is-s-s your tas-s-sty peepers-s-s.”
He hopped over the threshold like a black-billed magpie and curled the fingers of his metal gloves. The overlapping plates of steel were laid like an armadillo’s armour while the fingertips were honed to razor-sharp talons.
“I’ll go to sleep. I promise. I’ll go to sleep,” the boy pleaded, shutting his eyes.
Ole Lukoje perched on the foot of the bed, reached into his jacket pocket and drew out some dust. He held his hand to his mouth and prepared to blow.
“I wouldn’t do that,” a voice said behind him.
A stocky teenager in a tan leather duster tipped a salute with his black bowler, revealing a set of gauges around the hatband. The teen’s eyes glinted behind tinted goggles. He aimed a teslatron rifle at the raggedy man’s sickle nose. At the end of the barrel that blossomed into a large doughnut-shaped coil, the blunderbuss-styled musket crackled with a blue-white energy.
“Back away from the boy.”
Ole Lukoje hopped off the bed.
“Ah, yes-s-s. You mus-s-t want my papers-s-s.” He rummaged in his satchel, but produced nothing. “Deares-s-s-t me, I can’t s-s-seem to find them.”
