The Ectoplasmic Man (17 page)

“Did he not say that he could?”

“Yes, but—”

“Watson, Houdini may be a braggart, but I do not think he is an
idle one.”

I thoght of Houdini, helpless in his steel and leather cocoon, and prayed that Holmes’s confidence would not be disappointed. “Suppose Houdini is able to escape,” I asked, “what then?”

“The two of you will meet me at the gate of Gairstowe House. With Houdini’s aid, we will break into the Gairstowe vault, just as Kleppini must have done on the night of the crime, and just as he will have to do again this evening.”

“Again this evening! What do you mean by that?”

“You yourself have just told Kleppini that a document exists which renders those he stole useless. Even as we speak, he is contacting his mysterious employer with this unsettling bit of information. They will have but one recourse. They will have to steal the document in order to protect their plan.”

“But there is no such document!”

“They do not know that.”

“I see,” I said admiringly. “And when they break in—?” “We will be waiting.”

“Will we get both of them, Kleppini and the mastermind?”

“I believe the theft will require both of them. Perhaps now you understand why it was necessary to deceive you as I did. We are forcing their hand, my friend.” Our train thundered across the rail bridge, moments from Victoria. “The final card has now been played. Now, Watson” — his voice was hushed, but his grey eyes gleamed with an inner fire — “now, truly, the game is afoot!”

H
OUDINI
U
NBOUND

I
had no great difficulty gaining readmittance to the Scotland Yard gaol that evening, nor was the guard at all reluctant to leave me unattended outside of Houdini’s cell. “That bloke ain’t going nowhere,” said the guard with a laugh, leaving us alone in the empty block of cells.

Peering through the small barred window in the door of Houdini’s cell, I found the magician bound as securely as ever and looking, if possible, even more dispirited and piteous than when I had left him. His was a face heavy with affliction; but seeing me, the faintest glimmer of hope ignited in his doleful eyes — an unspoken query to which I responded with only the barest nod of my head. Immediately Houdini’s face — indeed his very form, trammelled as it was — seemed to flare with energy, as though the very thought of freedom had rekindled his still indomitable spirit. With a grateful sigh, Houdini closed his eyes, tilted his head back in deepest concentration, and there then began the most remarkable sequence of human exertions I have ever witnessed.

I have been told since that I am the only man who ever saw Houdini escape from a prison cell. This is to be regretted, for none of his public
feats, remarkable though they were, can have matched the sheer drama and exhilaration of that solitary struggle at Scotland Yard. Thinking on the scene now, I realise that the studied grandeur and careful suspense of Houdini’s stage performances were as nothing to the unembellished rigour of the challenges he met alone. If ever his skill, knowledge and strength were truly tested in all their individual and collective applications, it was not on some bright stage with his practised mannerisms and gilt properties, but there in that dank, cheerless prison. There he seemed to confront not only his physical constraints, but also the more formidable onus of personal vindication.

It began slowly enough, as Houdini sat straining his shoulders in a rhythmic motion against the layered bonds, the very motion which I had earlier mistaken for an effort to relax his muscles. “I’m trying to get some slack in these straps,” he explained. “I don’t need much, but it’s very difficult. I’m completely wrapped in canvas under all of this. They must have thought the canvas would make it harder on me, but actually it will help me to use the slack I get up here in other places. All I need is to be able to move my arm an inch or two.”

“I see,” I said, in what I hoped was an encouraging tone, “and this movement will help you obtain that slack?”

“Let’s hope so, Doctor,” Houdini said with a wan smile, casually up-ending his chair with his feet so that it crashed over with painful force.

“Mr Houdini!” I cried, gripping the barred window which separated us. “Are you hurt?”

“Not at all, Doctor,” said he, still strapped into the chair which now lay on its side. “And please call me Harry.”

“And you must call me John,” I said, watching with open-mouthed fascination as Houdini’s left arm began the most peculiar twists and undulations beneath its heavy bonds.

“If I can — just — slip off this one loop of chain—” Houdini’s voice came
in taut gasps of effort. “That’s all — I need — there!” he cried, as a small section of chain slipped over the arm of the chair. “That’s the first step.”

“Excellent!” I cried, though exactly what he thought he had gained was not clear to me. The one small loop of chain seemed a rather minute victory in the face of his complete cincture.

“You see, John,” Houdini explained, his head resting on the floor, “my legs are absolutely immobile. But I’ve given myself some slack, just enough so that I might be able to work my foot through some of these chains and straps.”

Houdini began to twist and turn his leg, straining against the bonds which held it to the leg of the chair. The movement was so slight and so restricted that it was impossible to detect any progress. “I think — I’m getting some movement,” he said through clenched teeth, sweat dampening his brow. “Very — difficult, though.”

I watched in horror as a steel chain drawn tight about his calf raked his flesh even through the layer of canvas, causing slashes of blood to seep through the material. “Just — a little more,” he gasped, fighting back what must have been terrible pain. “There now,” came a long sigh. “A moment to regain my strength, and then on to step two.”

“What is step two?” I asked, a little fearfully. Houdini did not reply. Again he closed his eyes, and then, with a desperate, convulsive strength, he began to buck and strain at the chair itself, trying, hopelessly, it appeared, to wrench his body into a tight ball even against the bonds which held him. It seemed to me that Houdini was determined to burst the constraints by sheer force of his muscles. On and on he strained, with a violence that rent the very air about him, until, with a crack that was barely audible above the groans of his labours, one leg of the chair gave way, allowing Houdini a precious bit of leverage. With a massive, final effort, Houdini twisted his body double, splintering the heavy wooden chair into a dozen fragments.

Free of the chair, but still completely ensconced in the bindings, Houdini lay so still among the wooden shards that I worried the effort had killed him.

“Houdini—?” I asked tentatively. “Harry? Are you all right?”

“Perfectly fine,” he replied brightly, his energy miraculously restored. “And now, step three.”

Looking very much like a lively Egyptian mummy, Houdini rolled away from the remains of the chair which had held him and lay flat on the cold stone floor of his cell. Only the outermost layer of his shroud had been loosened as he broke away from the chair. He was still wrapped as tightly as ever in a seemingly impregnable thickness of fetters. Separated from him by the sturdy door and steel bars, I could only watch helplessly as Houdini began his struggle anew. I daresay I felt the torment almost as keenly as he did when, with redoubled effort, Houdini writhed and groaned, rolled and kicked, so that in all ways his condition now resembled that of a madman. Perhaps that is what so frightened me: the recognition that I had seen a somewhat similar struggle before, years earlier, when I had watched a patient at Bedlam in his death throes.

So far as I was able, I tried to determine Houdini’s progress by the positions of his arms and legs within the confining cocoon, but this soon proved impossible. So laborious were his efforts that I found myself arriving at the absurd conclusion that he must have four arms and three legs at work under all that leather and steel. At one point, though, I could not fail to observe a hideous protrusion just below his neck, which, even amid all of his other contortions, indicated a serious injury.

“Houdini!” I cried. “Your shoulder is dislocated!”

“I know—” he gasped, mastering the discomfort with short swallows of air. “Did it — intentionally.”

“But the pain! It must be excrutiating!”

“Not — so bad.” He choked. “It — it’s necessary to bring — arm about
— there!” He expelled a long breath. “It’s back in the socket, and my hand is where I need it.”

Indeed, for the first time a bit of Houdini’s body became visible as his hand inched upward along his neck, pulling free of the thick leather collar and chains. Even for all I had seen, it was not until that hand appeared that I fully realised there was a method to all this madness, and that the great escape artist actually would be able to escape. This realisation so gladdened my heart that I was unable to stop myself from cheering and pounding gleefully on the door of the cell. “Bravo!” I shouted. “Bravo, Houdini!”

“Calm down, John,” Houdini cautioned from the floor. “Don’t bring the guard, I’m not out yet. This is only step four.” It occurred to me then that these careful steps and progressions of his were rather like the methods of Sherlock Holmes, in which a seemingly impossible problem was solved through a meticulously planned and flawlessly executed series of stratagems. While Holmes’s exertions were primarily cerebral, Houdini’s possessed an almost identical artistic cunning which, as I watched him unfasten a heavy steel clasp about his throat, seemed no less incredible.

“That first buckle was the hardest,” Houdini said, straining his free hand toward the next in a line which held the leather straps about him. “Now I should be able to get the second — there — and the third—” But despite his best effort, Houdini was unable to reach the third buckle with his free hand. Undaunted, he bent his body double and seized the buckle in his teeth, pulling it open with a brisk snap of his head.

“Bravo!” I cried again, being careful this time not to rouse the guard. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”

“I’d be surprised if you had,” Houdini answered with a laugh. “No one else can do it!” With this deserved self-flattery, Houdini undertook what was plainly the last in his series of toils. Twisting and turning still more, ever loosening the swathe about him, Houdini at last began to writhe free of the formidable bonds. Inch by inch, first his arm, then his shoulder,
Houdini undulated towards his freedom. At first I was irresistibly reminded of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. But as Houdini progressed, the impression became that of a babe at birth, a notion given weight by the unexplained absence of his clothing, and, even more distressingly, by the raw and bloodied condition of his exposed flesh.

“Harry!” I cried. “You are badly hurt!”

“It’s nothing, Doctor,” he assured me.

“Nothing? You are bleeding! And where are your clothes?”

“They took them away from me before I was tied up,” he answered, now half free of the swaddling, “in case I had any tools concealed in them.”

“Abominable!”

“Not really, John. I do have tools concealed in them.”

“But it is an insult! You have been seriously degraded!”

“Perhaps,” said he, casting off the last of those ungodly bonds with an exhausted but triumphant gesture, “but not any longer. Now I am a free man.”

It is impossible to say who felt the greater sense of relief as Houdini lay back on the cold stone floor of his cell. He had just overcome what may well have been the greatest single challenge of his career; but I, still clutching at that small barred window, felt tremendously moved as though I, too, had undergone an arduous rite, and I found myself offering a silent prayer of thanks.

At length Houdini drew himself up, stretching and testing his sore limbs, and examined his surroundings as if for the first time. “Well, my friend,” he said, pacing about the cell, “I’d say the first thing we have to do is to recover my clothes. They’re in a cell at the end of the corridor.”

“Have you forgotten that you are still locked in a prison cell?” I asked. “The first thing we must do is to get you out of there. I have brought Holmes’s lock-picking tools, will they be sufficient for you to—?”

It was over in an instant — a flash of metal, a sharp click, Houdini’s
hand rapping against the lock-plate — and the heavy cell door swung open, before I had even managed to complete my sentence.

“Were you saying something, John?”

“I thought your tools were in your clothes,” I replied evenly.

“Only some of them, John. Only some of them.” He gave me his trademark wink. “Hmm. These British gaols are a bit draughty. We must find my clothes before I catch pneumonia.”

“Very good. And then we must find a way to get you out of this building. My plan is this: I shall go to the main entrance and distract the guards in some manner, enabling you to—”

“No, John.”

“What do you mean? It may be a bit risky, but surely—”

“No, no. You don’t understand. I won’t let you compromise yourself any further on my behalf. You are already implicated in my escape. If it becomes known that you have helped me in any way, you would be considered as guilty as I am.”