Second Round: A Return to the Ur-Bar

by Garth Nix

  “And all of them you discovered to be charlatans. Unlike myself.”

  She paused to reassess him. “Very well,” she said, stepping around him and seating herself on the sofa. “Let’s begin.”

  Ford pulled the ankh from his pocket and settled into the chair opposite her. “Please take my right hand with your left, then take hold of this amulet with your right.” Bess eyed the object curiously, then did as instructed. Ford closed his eyes, but Bess kept hers open and fixed on him, watching for whatever trick he intended to pull from his sleeve.

  She gasped aloud when the spectral shape of another man emerged from Ford’s body. She blinked hard, assuming that her vision had gone blurry, but the ghost persisted.

  “You’re not Harry,” she said in a small whisper.

  No. My name is Fletcher. I serve as Mr. Ford’s spirit guide. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Houdini.

  Bess was speechless. Her eyes darted around the room, looking for mirrors or some other tool of the magician’s trade that might explain this apparition. She had been Houdini’s assistant since his earliest days touring small-town theaters and vaudeville houses. She would have been intimately familiar with his tricks and the tricks of the fraudulent psychics he had exposed. When she turned back to face Ford, he could see her shock in realizing this was no illusion.

  “Shall we proceed?” Ford asked. Before Bess could respond, he continued, “O, Spirit of Harry Houdini, née Ehrich Weiss, we beseech thee. Return across the veil of death to share your counsel and wisdom with us, the living.”

  And then he was there. Misty wisps of light came into being and condensed into a stocky, slightly bow-legged figure, with a broad face and deep-set eyes. “Good God,” she whispered. “Harry?”

  The image glowed brighter as a smile stretched across its face. Oh … Bessie …

  Bess nearly leapt to her feet, but Ford tightened his grip, pressing one of the talisman’s sharp points into the flesh of her palm, and held her in place. “Harry, it is you, isn’t it? You always said that if you could find the way back to me after death, you would.”

  Yes, my love, I did, Houdini said. I’m only sorry that this son of a bitch found it first.

  “Mind your manners, Harry,” Ford warned.

  Fuck you, Ford—

  Ford released Bess’ hands, breaking their psychic circle and casting Houdini from the physical plane. Bess blinked at the empty space where her husband and Ford’s spirit guide had just been. “What happened?” she asked Ford. “What did you just do?”

  “Was he so foul-mouthed in life?” Ford asked, ignoring her question. “I know the dead tend to have a more relaxed sense of propriety, but …”

  “Harry never minced words,” Bess told him. “If he called you a son of a bitch, likelihood is that’s just what you are.”

  Ford chuckled at that. “Then you do accept that I’ve called the spirit of Harry Houdini back from beyond the grave.”

  “I … I don’t …” Bess shook her head, unsure just what she wanted to believe.

  Ford sighed in impatience. “Rumor is that you and your husband agreed on a message he would relay to you if he were to come back, to prove he was who he said. Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  Ford grabbed hold of her hands again and a moment later both Fletcher and Houdini took visible form again.

  —and the horse you rode in on, Houdini completed his earlier sentiment.

  Ford gave him a patient smile. “Harry, your dear wife doesn’t believe who you say you are.”

  How odd that she’d find you unworthy of her trust.

  “Do you love your wife?”

  The ghost’s ire toward the medium grew even higher. Of course I do.

  “Now mind, I’m speaking in the present tense. Do you, the ever-living spirit of Harry Houdini, continue to love this woman even from beyond the veil?”

  Houdini turned his gaze to Bess again. With all I am, yes.

  “And wouldn’t you like her to believe that, without doubts?” Ford asked him. “Do you have anything you might say to her that would convince her of the truth of those words?”

  Houdini winced and said to Bess, That message was to protect you, so you could dismiss all of the shams who were sure to crawl out of the woodwork to take advantage of a grieving widow.

  “I know,” Bess said. “And it’s worked that way until now. But you need to tell me. I need to hear it.”

  Houdini sighed, then intoned in his booming stage voice: Rosabelle, answer, tell, pray-answer, look, tell, answer-answer, tell.

  Ford looked from Houdini to his widow. “What was that gibberish?”

  “It’s a code,” she explained. “When Harry and I were just starting out, we did a mind-reading routine. He’d be blindfolded, I’d have an audience member hold up an object, and he’d say what it was … after I used the code to spell it out for him.”

  “So what does it mean?”

  “‘Rosabelle’ is the key. I need to take off my wedding ring.”

  Bess tried to pull her left hand free, but Ford tightened his grip. “Why?”

  “Because we haven’t used the code in ages,” she told him, wincing. “There’s an engraving inside. It will let me decode it.”

  “Do not break the circle,” he told her, as he adjusted his right hand’s grip and started working the ring up her finger.

  What does it matter if the circle breaks? asked Fletcher, who had been unusually quiet throughout the séance. You can call Houdini back at will.

  “Yes, my will,” Ford answered. “I’ll decide when, or if, Mr. Houdini is allowed to escape.” Taking care to keep his hand in contact with hers, Ford wrenched the ring up past Bess’ knuckles and off her finger. With the nimbleness of a stage magician, he transferred it into her palm, then shifted his grip to her wrist.

  Bess lifted her hand, rolled the ring so that it caught the light at the right angle, and then read—or rather, sang: “Rosabelle, sweet Rosabelle, I love you more than I can tell …”

  Over me you cast a spell, Houdini joined in, and the two completed the verse in unison: I love you, my sweet Rosabelle.

  “And so?” Ford prompted. “What does it mean?”

  Bess let the ring fall from her fingers and drop onto the low coffee table between Ford and herself. “The song is the one Harry would sing to me while we were courting. But you mean the code. Answer, tell, pray-answer, look, tell, answer-answer, tell spells out the word ‘believe.’”

  Ford smiled and nodded at that. “So now you believe that I’ve truly brought your husband back from the other realm.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said, looking pained. “And I believe that using Rosabelle is the right thing to do.”

  “Using Rosabelle? What is that supposed—” Ford started to ask, but then he looked down and saw Mrs. Houdini’s ring spinning on the table, gaining speed, then actually rising off the surface. Ford stared dumbfounded, so absorbed that he barely registered the way the ankh was heating up in his hand. He tried to drop it, but his fingers were locked into a fist.

  I love you, Bessie, forever and always, Houdini said. Believe.

  The spinning ring rose higher and the artifact felt as if it was now burning into his palm. Then something like an electrical current shot up his arm and through his entire body, launching Ford over the back of his chair and flinging him across the room, striking the marble fireplace head first.

  * * *

  Is he dead?

  Not quite. He’s hurt, but I trust Bess to take care of him.

  Ford moaned. What just happened? He tried to rub his blurry eyes, but his arms refused to move. He couldn’t even say for certain that he still had arms.

  A true magician never reveals his secrets, Houdini answered him, though in this case, I feel an exception to the rule is justified. When I first began my efforts to discredit false spiritualists, there were many who accused me of subterfuge, suggesting my motivation was to protect my own secrets.


  They said your escapes could only be successful with supernatural assistance, Ford recalled. That you could only have survived so many brushes with death if you were in fact in league with spirits.

  Yes. And those people were correct.

  Ford’s vision finally cleared and both Houdini and Fletcher came into sharp focus. But somehow, Mrs. Houdini and her home remained disturbingly indistinct. The ring… it’s another talisman …

  Yes. A key to loosen any lock. Even one as powerful as Nefertiti’s ankh. You’ve provided me, Mr. Ford, with my final and most impossible escape! Houdini beamed and bent forward in a deep theatrical bow. And now, farewell … and congratulations to you, Mr. Fletcher.

  The great magician’s form dissipated as he slipped beyond the veil again. Ford then looked to Fletcher. ‘Congratulations?’

  I wasn’t ready to cross over that day you found me in that muddy trench, but I’ve been ready for a long time since. Gil saw my predicament; that’s why he gave you the ankh. He knew lock would be drawn to key, Fletcher explained, then began to slowly fade away just as Houdini had.

  W-what? Ford stammered. Fletcher, come back here! You can’t just … you ca—

  * * *

  “—kakkakk!” The wracking cough, triggered by the ammonia-soaked rag held under his nose, sent explosions of pain through Ford’s skull.

  “Thank Heavens!” he heard Bess Houdini’s voice say from somewhere above where he lay on the floor. “Now, run, go fetch Dr. Neiderkorn!” A pair of feet, presumably belonging to the housekeeper, hurried off and faded away. “Mr. Ford? Can you hear me? Can you speak?”

  Ford moaned and cracked his eyelids open a sliver. “Yes, Mrs. Houdini, I hear you,” he managed to croak … and then stopped. His head was throbbing, but he pushed the pain aside to search his mind.

  “You’re the only one I hear.” It had been such a long time he had almost forgotten what it felt like to be alone inside his own head. “Fletcher? Fletcher?”

  He tried to sit up, but was immediately overwhelmed by dizziness. The world faded to gray and he dreamt he was back in the army hospital in France, doctors poking at his body, the dead Scotsman poking at his thoughts. When he came to again, he saw it was Mrs. Houdini’s physician doing the prodding, while his head was silent. The doctor said something, to which Ford nodded absently, then bid his farewell.

  Moments later, the housekeeper helped him into his coat as Mrs. Houdini lead them to the front door. They stopped in the foyer, where Bess handed a slip of paper to him. He was shocked to see it was a check for ten thousand dollars. “You did contact Harry’s spirit, after all,” she said in answer to Ford’s unspoken question. “And more importantly, you helped destroy the means of ever bringing him back again.” With that, she handed him the ankh and opened the door for him.

  Standing alone on the sidewalk, Ford continued to stare at the check in his right hand, dumbfounded.

  This is what you wanted, isn’t it?

  It was own voice, asking his own rhetorical question, but still his eyes shifted to the ankh in his left hand. Its jewel was gone now and, he knew, running his fingers over it, that its power had been neutralized.

  With a flick of his wrist, he tossed the relic down the nearest storm drain. Yeah, this is all I wanted, he assured himself as he dug both hands deep into his coat pockets and made his way down the busy city street alone.

  Welcome

  to the Jungle Bar

  Garth Nix

  Neville Westerley was having a beer—not his first, not even his fifth—in the Sergeant’s Mess at Nui Dat when the Australian warrant officer felt someone standing next to him at the bar, way too close. So he detached his attention from drinking for the second or two it would take to work out whether someone needed a forceful reminder of the importance of personal space or to take other action if it was the beginning of a practical joke by one of his mates.

  His raised almost-fist turned into a half-wave, half-salute as he took in the tiger-stripe camouflage, the flower-like rank symbol on the epaulettes, and finally the sardonic and once well-known smile of Cao Van Dzung.

  “Who let you in here?” he grumbled. “Major.”

  “McLintock invited me,” said Major Cao easily, pointing to a group of NCOs at a table near the door who were busy passing around a very large bottle of Bundaberg rum to spice up their own beers.

  “I didn’t mean the sergeant’s mess,” said Westerley. “I meant the base.”

  “Who’d want to keep me out?” Cao signaled the bartender.

  “Anyone who knows you.”

  “Lucky I came in with General Vinh Loc then.”

  “What’s he want here?”

  “Who knows?” shrugged Cao. “A slouch hat? A passport?”

  He took a sip of the newly-arrived beer, which came in a frosted glass, beads of condensation making it slippery. The mess was air-conditioned, but not as effectively as an American NCO’s club would be, the air still humid, if not as hot as outside.

  “A passport?” asked Westerley, surprised.

  Cao shrugged.

  “He thinks about the future a lot, the general. He worries. Maybe not so confident now it seems Nixon meant what he said about troop withdrawals. I hear your lot are following that lead.” Cao indicated the room. “They’re all going home next week, aren’t they? And no new battalion here to replace them. Or coming out.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Westerley. “There’s no reduction in the Team’s numbers.”

  He was talking about the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam, to which he belonged, as indicated by the fact he wore the same tiger-stripe camo as Cao, not Australian Army green. Westerley was on his fourth tour, this time around attached as an advisor to an Army of South Vietnam Mike Force special unit. With the unit just returned from a spectacularly unsuccessful search and destroy mission just short of the DMZ, the officers and advisors had been sent on a few days leave to get them out of sight of anyone who mattered. It was good timing for Westerley, who had managed to hitch several helicopter rides to get over to Nui Dat to say goodbye to some mates in the 8th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, who were indeed heading home very shortly.

  After their inauspicious greeting, Cao and Westerley drank in silence. Westerley knew the Vietnamese officer would get to whatever it was that had brought him here in due course, and that whatever it was, he wouldn’t like it. He and Cao had served together in the Central Highlands, where the Major (then Captain) had commanded a Montagnard special forces unit and he’d been their advisor.

  They’d been through a great deal together, including various things that would never appear in any official report, though one mission that had made it on the record, big time, was the recovery of the crew of a downed helicopter which turned out to be the Divisional C&C craft of a US major-general, with him on board. Cao’s reward for that, besides the promotion, was to be seconded to some snake-eating, super-secret unit run out of MAC-SOG. Westerley had got a bar to the DCM he’d been awarded in Korea and had been issued a similar invitation, but had refused it. He didn’t want to go down the assassination road, which was where he thought Cao was headed.

  Where he presumably was now.

  “We want to borrow you for a while,” Cao said finally, leaning close, his voice low. He’d stopped drinking at his third beer, letting Westerley continue on alone, now well into his tenth or eleventh.

  “Who’s we?” asked Westerley. They both spoke in Vietnamese now, the better to keep the conversation confidential. There were two other advisors in the mess who were fluent speakers, but the regular grunt NCOs typically only knew a few words. A significant failing in Westerley’s opinion, but then he wasn’t in charge.

  “You know,” said Cao. He made a highly unofficial field signal, an undulation of his hand with two fingers striking, suggesting a snake with fangs.

  “What does that theatrical crap … look, I told you before, I’m not doing the shooting people in the back of the head in the night shit,” said
Westerley.

  “This isn’t … it’s not one of those jobs,” said Cao.

  “What is it then?”

  “Hard to describe,” said Cao. He hesitated, then said, “Basically we want you to check out a bar.”

  “What?”

  Cao hesitated again.

  “You remember that time in Polei Kleng?”

  “What time?”

  Cao gave him a look. There was really no question about which particular time he was talking about.

  “Yeah, I remember,” said Westerley reluctantly. “I’m not quite sure exactly what … but I remember. What’s that got to do with this bar?”

  “Maybe a lot,” said Cao.

  The event was a single, ferocious attack upon an ambush patrol that had been led by Cao, with Westerley along to coordinate artillery and air support. Fourteen veteran Montagnard soldiers—all comparable in Westerley’s opinion to the American Green Berets, if not quite to his own home regiment, the Australian SAS—were killed in the surprise attack, which was not a counter-ambush, was not conducted with firearms, and as far as he could tell, actually had nothing to do with the Viet Cong or the NVA or in fact any human antagonist.

  Cao’s ambush had been professionally laid to pin any passing enemy coming along a trail against the deep stream that ran alongside it, with claymores at each end to close the killing ground and the ambushers concealed in the thick undergrowth on the rising ground above the trail that ran next to the stream. The jungle was much denser behind, so it would be very difficult for any counterattack to dislodge the ambushers or for a probe to detect them.

  But no one had come along the path or out of the deep jungle. All of a sudden, a single attacker was just there, right in the middle of the ambush position. He—or it—killed three men in the first dozen seconds by biting their heads off and went on to kill eleven others in the same fashion. Cao was an early, non-lethal casualty, flung down the slope into the stream by something he could not or would not later describe.