Published by Melbourne Books
Level 9, 100 Collins Street,
Melbourne, VIC 3000
Australia
info@melbournebooks.com.au
Copyright © Alan Attwood 2024
Title: Houdini Unbound: Mystery, Music and Flying Machines
Author: Alan Attwood
eISBN: 978-1-922779-30-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
For the two Isobels.
His actual deeds and the stories that have been fabricated about him are almost indistinguishable … and I am sure that no-one could enjoy that situation more than Houdini himself.
—James Randi (‘The Amazing Randi’)
1
THE comet is coming.
Seventy-five years have passed since the last sighting of Halley’s Comet, a span longer than most lifetimes. Longer than the reign of Queen Victoria, a princess in layers of petticoats when the comet appeared in 1835 and now dead for almost a decade. Her stony likeness surveys parks and esplanades around Australia while passers-by scan the heavens for the comet, which to some is a harbinger of pestilence and drought. People say the earth will pass through poisonous gases in its spectacular tail. To ward off noxious effects they sniff camphor and take comet pills made of sugar and hope.
It is the year of the comet, 1910, but on this hot February afternoon in Melbourne, a young city named after the late monarch’s first prime minister, there is a distraction: a public event advertised in newspapers and on placards carried through streets by youths with scuffed knees. People come early to secure a vantage point. They press up against the sides of Queen’s Bridge; push back on to the road blocking wagons and bicycles, horse-drawn cabs and smoke-belching motor cars; peer from both banks of the Yarra River, those on the south side shielding their eyes against the sun.
Young clerks and office boys and urchins clamber three-deep on to narrow ledges. In the crush, women offer children to strangers, entreating them to hold their infants aloft so the little ones can witness the miracle. They wait for a short, thick-set man in a bright blue bathing-costume who arrives in a rush and appears not at all surprised to find thousands of restless spectators gawping at him. He has seen others just like them in different places many times before.
Like a condemned prisoner confronting his execution with equanimity he mounts a parapet high above the sluggish water and holds out his wrists to be manacled. He smiles when chains are wound around his neck and chest and shoulders, as if it were all a great joke. He says something in mock complaint about their weight, but only those closest to him can hear. His restraints are checked, to confirm they are secure.
Then, with a slight nod of his head, though perhaps he is just glancing down to see how far he must fall before his bare feet break the surface of the river, he steps into air as warm as blood.
2
THE water tastes of mud and is very dark as the chains carry him down.
Harry likes to look up as he sinks. Sometimes he fancies he can make out faces watching from above, but all he sees this time is murky yellow soup and all he can hear are bubbles as he releases his breath slowly while the chains drag him down deeper.
Harry’s assistant, Franz Kukol, attended to the chains: one heavy loop around his neck; further loops around each arm, high up; then the links attached to a padlock behind his back. Harry puffed out his chest and flexed his muscles as the chains went on, which means there is slack to work with when he relaxes his body. But first he must remove the handcuffs securing his wrists. They are shackled together above the waistband of his bathing trunks, into which he has secreted a metal pin like a dandy’s toothpick. As he descends into the cold cloudy darkness, he locates the pin and inserts it into the lock of the right cuff. The metal claws release their grip.
Eleven, twelve, thirteen …
Harry is counting. He knows how long the trick should take. Fifteen seconds to remove the cuffs; another seven or eight to wriggle free of the chains after unsnapping the lock with pressure applied to its underside; a further ten or eleven to surface. His most rapid escape, in Boston, required just thirty-one seconds. The slowest took him a minute and five seconds in Aberdeen, where the sea was storm-tossed and the Scottish authorities were reluctant to let him jump from the pier. Harry leapt from a dinghy, a little way out from shore, so as not to disappoint all those who had turned up to see him. The dinghy was rocked by waves. He thumped his head on the side going over and blacked out briefly until the chill revived him and he got to work.
He learnt from that mishap. Never before had he heard such cheers as those from the people on the Aberdeen pier when he surfaced – anxious people who thought they had witnessed his death and then realised they had seen something remarkable. So now he takes things slowly.
In New York’s Hudson River he hid under the mayor’s launch long after the chains were off just to heighten suspense. His training has taught him he can stay submerged, lying still, for close to two minutes if he must.
Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen …
He is on the bottom, which surprises him. This river is shallower than Rickards the promoter suggested. Harry can feel sludge and stones under his bare toes, which are as tactile as his fingertips. He can feel but not see. This does not worry him; he has learnt to do all his routines blindfolded. He tumbles in the water, arching his back and twisting his hands until they are behind his shoulders so he can work on the chains.
He twists and spins and then he is stuck.
A section of chain near his left shoulder has caught on something. Harry reaches around with his right hand. It is a log, he thinks, or junk, or something coated with slime that has snagged him. Now he can hear a faint buzzing sound as he tugs where he is trapped. The object seems to shift a little in the ooze but the chain is still caught.
Thirty-four, thirty-five …
This has never happened before. Harry grimaces. Is it all going to end like this, on the bottom of a river in a city he had never even heard of a few months earlier? How ridiculous it would be: Houdini the Great Mysteriarch, the Sensation of Great Britain, America and All Europe, caught like a groper on a snagged line in filthy water on the wrong side of the world. He tumbles again, as best he can. A further length of chain comes loose. His right shoulder is free and he can work on the snared links.
