Houdini and Me by Dan Gutman (large screen ebook reader txt) 📕

trolleys, plus a few horse and buggies scattered around the blocks surrounding the Kansas City Star building. People were leaning out of windows waving, perched precariously on ledges, and wrapped around telephone poles.

I remembered something else Houdini had texted me.

“If I can escape,” he said, “people feel they can escape from the thing they fear. I gave people hope.”

Snap out of it, I told myself. I had to get past my fear of heights and face it.

It was time to get to work. I knew from reading books that one of the ways Houdini got out of a straitjacket was to intentionally dislocate his shoulder. Well, I wasn’t about to do that. I was going to have to get out of the thing on my own.

I pushed my arms out against the straitjacket as hard as I could, grunting from the effort.

Nothing. That got me nowhere, as expected. The straitjacket was wrapped pretty tightly. But even so, there was just a little slack in the cloth. That, I knew, was another one of Houdini’s secrets. As they were putting a straitjacket on him, he would take a deep breath to expand his chest as much as he could. At the same time, he would hunch his shoulders and hold his arms just a little bit away from his sides. That gave him a tiny bit of slack to work with, and that was all he needed.

Instinctively, I had done the same thing when they put the straitjacket on me. So when I expelled all the air in my lungs, there was some slack in the cloth. Using as much power as I could muster, I pushed my elbows down against my knees to get a little more room to allow me to lift my arms up.

I jammed my right elbow upward until it was closer to my face. I figured that if I could get one arm near my head, I might be able to unbuckle a strap with my teeth. I was already sweating and exhausted from struggling.

“You can do it, Houdini!” somebody shouted from below. “You can do anything!”

It occurred to me that being upside down may have actually been an advantage. Gravity made it easier for me to push my arm above my head. I somehow managed to force one elbow to the top of the straitjacket. Once my wrist was close enough to my face, I got to work loosening the buckle with my teeth.

It wasn’t easy. The rope was twisting while I was thrashing and bending from the waist. I knew I was running out of time. I could feel the blood rushing to my head. Soon, I knew, I would become unconscious.

I was grunting, sweating, and flailing as I worked on the buckle with my mouth. The crowd below was loving it, yelling and screaming and urging me on. They seemed to enjoy watching me struggle.

I remembered what Houdini had texted me about escape. Everybody wants to escape from something. Human beings all want something different than what we have, something better. I guess that’s what motivated us to send a man to the moon, to cure diseases, to invent new machines, or simply to get a better job and earn more money to make our lives easier. We all want to escape from who we are. Then we get to a new place and want to escape from there.

I managed to get the first buckle open with my teeth. But the wind was picking up, which caused the cable to sway back and forth like a pendulum. On each swing, I was getting dangerously close to a concrete window ledge. My head almost banged against it. The crowd gasped every time I swung close to the edge.

Houdini probably loved when this happened, I figured. Me, I hated every second of it.

I kept on grunting, sweating, and flailing around wildly as I worked to free my arms. Finally, after what felt like twenty minutes but was probably closer to ten, I was able to jerk my head and neck to get my arms out of the jacket. At that point, I could reach my back. Even though my hands were still trapped in the sleeves, I was able to feel through the sleeves to work on the other buckles. One by one, I got them loose.

That was it! I ripped the jacket off my body and held my arms out on both sides like a cross. The crowd went nuts.

Finally, with a flourish, I dropped the straitjacket into the crowd below. There was cheering like I had never heard in my life.

I don’t remember what happened after that. I must have passed out.

METAMORPHOSIS, PART II

Then I had a dream. I think it was a dream, anyway.

While I’m hanging upside down in Kansas City, Houdini has pulled off his end of the Metamorphosis. He’s alive. And he’s me, an eleven-year-old boy in New York City—my town—and in my century.

Houdini is in the middle of Times Square—Forty-Second Street and Broadway. You know, that spot where they drop the ball on New Year’s Eve? The center of the universe.

Houdini opens his eyes and gazes up in wonder. He’s been to Times Square a thousand times, but not in the 21st century. He’d seen a few skyscrapers, but nothing like the ones we have today. Now they’re gigantic, surrounding him in every direction. And they all have huge signs on the side advertising movies, TV shows, and the latest Broadway musicals. Most of the signs are video screens. Houdini has never seen a video screen in his life.

Then he looks down at himself.

“I’m a boy!” he says triumphantly. “I did it!”

The streets are teeming with thousands of people, just as they are in Kansas City, yet it’s so different. The men and women aren’t wearing hats, as just about everybody did in Houdini’s day. Some of them are wearing baseball caps, even some women. And they’re wearing