Thirteen Days to Midnight

  “Well, I guess that makes sense, then.”

  “What makes sense?”

  “I’m just thinking to myself, you’ve known Ophelia James for thirteen days. I counted. Me? You’ve known me longer than almost anyone, and we’re best friends.”

  “I can’t explain it, okay? I think I was in love with that girl the moment I saw her. It doesn’t feel like just thirteen days. It feels like there’s everything that came before I met Oh and then everything that came after.”

  Milo nodded thoughtfully, picked up the pipe again.

  “I see what you mean, but I don’t think she wants to see either one of us right now,” said Milo.

  “Maybe not. But—”

  “Dude, just open it. Driving won’t make it any easier.” Milo smacked his lips. “Wait, before you do that—this crab shack got any water?”

  I knew there were cans of 7UP sitting at the bottom of the cooler and pulled two of them out, snapping the tops and setting them on the counter.

  “You’re a regular bartender. Don’t expect a big tip, Mr. Moneybags.”

  “Mr. Fielding said 7UP was the ultimate pipe-smoking beverage. The fizz and the sugar soothed his throat and gave his pipe a sweet flavor.”

  “Bottoms up,” said Milo, chugging down half the contents of his can in four giant gulps. It was followed by a wet, smoky burp.

  I sat down on my barstool, spinning the key between my fingers. In the moment that I hesitated to open the box, my phone started vibrating on the bar and Milo picked it up. It wasn’t a text, because it kept vibrating over and over. Someone was calling.

  “It’s Oh.”

  “No way,” I said, grabbing my phone from Milo and clicking the call to life. Oh started talking before I could say hello.

  “Are you near a computer? You have to be.”

  “Um, hi, Oh, how are you?”

  “Tell me you are, Jacob. Someone’s in trouble.”

  I could imagine her hunched over the police scanner, eyes drained of life.

  “Look, Oh, I’m not sure—”

  “It’s a kid, Jacob. A kid. She’s like, nine. Please, just get online.”

  “Hang on,” I said, putting my hand over the speaker. I whispered to Milo, “There’s no computer in here.”

  Milo had figured out what was going on without me having to tell him. He’d seen this kind of thing play out before.

  “Fake her.”

  “What?”

  “She’s lying. You should lie right back.”

  “No, no, that’s not—she wouldn’t do that.”

  Oh was yelling my name, her small voice desperate and haunted.

  “You sure about this?” I asked Milo.

  “No, but if I’m right, you’re going to be glad you listened to me.”

  I breathed deep, filling my lungs with Captain Jack, and put the phone back to my ear.

  “Jacob? Where are you?”

  “I’m here, sorry, looking for a laptop here in the pipe shop. I’m at the coast with Milo. Um, it’s going to take a second, but I can get online. Did you send me a picture or what?”

  “I e-mailed it to you. Her name is Ann. I sent you her picture, you understand?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Just look at the picture and do your thing, okay? You can save her, Jacob. She needs us.”

  “Okay, I got it. Computer is up and we’re online. Hang on.”

  I put my hand over the phone again and Milo broke in quietly.

  “Where is she?”

  “Don’t know. She sounds sincere though, like she really needs me to do this.”

  “Did you do it? Did you do it?” Oh kept yelling into the phone.

  “Okay, Oh, calm down. I see her. I see Ann.”

  “What are you waiting for? She’s at the bottom of a well, Jacob. This kid could die any second. Do it!”

  “Okay, okay—hang on.”

  I closed my eyes and thought of Oh’s face. In my mind I saw her smiling, like she was when I met her, confident and full of life. It took me a second to go all the way through with it, because I was afraid of what might happen next.

  I said the words out loud so Oh could hear them, and it wasn’t two seconds later that she responded in a cold, detached voice.

  “Thank you, Jacob. Good-bye.”

  The line went dead.

  “There is no Ann,” said Milo. “She’s lying.”

  “I don’t know—maybe… I just, damn! I hate this. If she was telling the truth, she’ll never forgive me. She’ll hate me for this.”

  Milo relit his pipe. There wasn’t much else to say. I’d made a choice, and now we’d have to see how it turned out. I thought about calling or texting her, making sure she was okay, but I didn’t have to. Not even a full minute had passed and she was already texting me.

  You lied to me.

  “Was I right?” Milo asked, leaning over so he could see the screen.

  “Yeah, you were right.”

  Another text.

  You killed that girl! You’re a killer! Take it back!

  “She’s lying, Jacob. There is no girl. She wouldn’t be telling you to take it back if there was. She’s confused.”

  “What does this even mean?” I asked. But I knew what it meant. Oh had tried to take her own life. How else would she know I’d lied to her?

  I remembered the way she said, Thank you, Jacob. Good-bye. I imagined her shutting the phone off and then picking up a gun or slicing herself with a razor blade. She’d figured out the truth on her own.

  “Oh wants to die,” I said, trying to hold myself together.

  “I think we should open that box,” Milo said.

  I’d dropped the key on the bar, and Milo picked it up and held it out to me.

  “It’s our best shot at some answers. Open it, then we’ll go find her.”

  I put the key in and turned it. The lid didn’t tilt up, it slid back, like pins had been holding it in place. The whole top came off in my hand. Inside were yellow pages of paper covered in perfect handwriting.

  It started off with a bang.

  My name is Jonathan Fielding and I was born on July 12, 1872, in New England. It is now exactly 100 years later (July 12, 1972), and it seems as a good a time as any to record what I know.

  I preface this document (I expect it to be short), by mentioning that while I like a good breakfast, a full pipe, and the smell of the Pacific, I do not particularly enjoy writing. Expect the brevity of Hemingway delivered with none of his skills.

  This is the telling of a curse, passed from one man to another, and I don’t suppose anyone will believe me. All of what I am about to say is covered in the bad stink of a lie. Nothing about it can be true. The characters involved are in every way implausible: me, a fifty-four-year-old nothing of a man, and he, the greatest escape artist of them all. What passed between us, and what came after, is even harder to believe.

  I will be judged a deceiver and a fool after I’m gone, but that will not change what happened to me. My promise is all I have to give, and for most, it won’t be enough. My pledge is simply this:

  You’ll find no lies here.

  In October of the year 1926 I attended a show at the Princess Theater in Montreal and had the good fortune of being called to the stage by the greatest escape artist and magician of them all, Harry Houdini.

  I realize we are already in dangerous territory. Houdini, you ask? The Houdini? Frankly, I feel the same sense of disbelief, but these are the facts of what has happened to me, and yes, they begin with the supernaturally gifted escapist whether I like it or not. So as to minimize the fantastic nature of these events, I will, henceforth, refer to him as Mr. H.

  Mr. H brought me to the center of the stage, looked me straight in the eye, and told me I was indestructible. Then he set me on a flat table and proceeded to skewer me with seven knives: one in each leg, one in each arm, one in my heart, another in my neck, and a final blade in one ear and out the other.

  I didn’t f
eel a thing while they were going in or coming out. When he had each of the blades out I was stood upright, and someone held a balloon behind my head. Mr. H took out a revolver, placed it against my forehead, and shot a bullet through my skull, popping the balloon on the other side. The crowd erupted in applause, and Mr. H sent me back to my seat with a pat on the shoulder.

  After the show, I found a scrap of paper in my pocket (I will tape it to the last sheet of this telling). It instructed me to come to the back door of the theater and ask for Mr. Lutz, which I did. This was a code, I soon found, because minutes later I was sitting alone with Mr. H in his dressing room, the door closed behind us.

  He stared at me as I told him how much I’d enjoyed the show. He let me run on until I stopped. After a time of awkward silence he spoke.

  “You have it now.”

  I did not understand what he meant. I thought I was part of an elaborate trick that would find its end soon enough. But as he went on, I assumed he was not well, so fantastic were the things he told me. Mr. H began to describe to me, in the most curious way, that he had passed a power to me that he had gotten many years before.

  You may ask yourself, why did he choose to gift a middle-aged nobody such as myself? I’ve asked the same thing many times over the years, and really, there’s only one possible answer. I believe it was a truly random selection, that there was something in his heart that told him to let fate take its course. In his mind, he was not the one to choose. Someone or something else was meant to choose for him.

  This power had long been trapped in the world of magic, so said Mr. H, and previously had always passed to the greatest among them, always kept as a dark secret known only to a few. It was, as Mr. H described it, the only true magic there ever was. All the rest was sleight of hand and distraction and trickery. But this one thing, it was real, it was true. And what was more, it was very much like a living thing. The Black Lion, he called it, and at the sound of those words I felt something stirring in my chest. Something wicked that hadn’t been there before.

  “You feel it, don’t you?” he asked me, a look of longing appearing on his face. “You feel the Black Lion. It has ways of its own, you will find.”

  I will try my best to remember and retell as precisely as I can everything that he then told me about this “Black Lion.” He tried to explain it like this:

  Everything has its opposite. Good and evil, black and white, death and immortality. He described the last of these as a trick of the soul. The idea of death, for us, is terrible. Wouldn’t we all agree immortality sounds more appealing? That is the trick, or so he said, for in reality it is death that is magnificent and immortality the greatest of all despairs. We only return home in death. Everything that comes before is a pilgrimage, but the journey that leads forever to nowhere is hopeless. It is the black lion, circling humanity in a relentless spiral.

  Somewhere, some time, in the long dark halls of magic, the black lion was summoned by a great magician who coveted immortality. Mr. H always doubted that this man, if he was a man at all, had the slightest idea of what he was doing. There was an evil desire in his heart to live forever and have the dark arts at his disposal. And yet he must have stumbled into it, knew nothing of what he’d done, and left it hidden among a very few when he grew tired of the thrill. It wasn’t until later, down through the ages, that its beastly nature was better understood.

  The black lion had been tamed, as it were, no longer free to roam, but trapped in the soul of one man.

  I questioned him then, because at this point I still had very little idea what it was he meant by all this talk of immortality and the beast. I call it the beast because I feared it from the start. The mere thought of a black lion with its claws and teeth tearing from within me frightened me half to death. And yet, at the time, I felt certain the trick was about to be played out. The lights would flutter and a conjuring of one sort or another would make its appearance.

  But then Mr. H did the strangest thing. He removed the same revolver from his desk drawer, pointed it at me, and shot a bullet through my heart. The sound was stunning in the confined space and made him grab for his ears in shock. I felt the bullet, like a nudge against my skin, and thought I was about to die. Within seconds there was a knock and yelling. Mr. H opened the door, subdued the growing crowd with lies about a trick he was experimenting with, and closed the door to the world outside. I sat stunned, searching my coat for blood and finding none, unable to speak.

  When the door was closed and I had checked about myself, I, too, thought I’d been tricked. I congratulated him, then warned that people of my age succumbed to heart attacks all the time from lesser acts of trickery. He had to stab me again, twice actually, before I began to believe what he’d done to me. I really was indestructible, as he’d said.

  This was no trick.

  After that his words became even stranger, layered with complexity and metaphor. He took out a tattered journal, papers falling to the floor as he opened it up, and he began sifting through his notes. He was slow about his business, fanning over diagrams of escape tricks yet to be unleashed on the world, searching for something. He came to a certain page, closed the journal, but held the page in question with his finger.

  He told me what he knew to be true. There was no record, nothing to fall back on. Only what Mr. H had been told and what he’d figured out on his own.

  “The black lion is immortality with a secret door. Under its watch, a man can live forever, but he can end his long and lonely life anytime he wants.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Pass the power to someone else, but then you must go. Protect others at your own peril.”

  I asked him what would happen if I told someone else they were indestructible but chose not to take it—and here he was quick to warn me of using that word, a word of consequence, he called it. The truth was, I didn’t think I had the nerve to kill myself under any circumstances.

  He seemed to read my mind, his voice becoming cold and icy there in the room.

  “You’re thinking about giving it to me now, aren’t you? I can see it in your eyes. Trust me, that would be a very bad idea.”

  “Why? Why can’t I get rid of it?”

  “Well, you could. You just wouldn’t like what I’d have to do to you. If you give it back I really will have to kill you. You really will feel the pain and fear and loathing of death. And then you’ll come back to life.”

  “Come back?” I asked him. “What do you mean, come back?”

  “I think you know exactly what I mean, Mr. Fielding.”

  I was completely baffled. Did he mean to kill me if I yelled the words at him? Did he actually think I’d come back to life if he did? It was insanity!

  He went on, and I truly assumed I was talking to a lunatic.

  “Don’t give it away unless you’re sure, and for God’s sake, don’t start trying to pass it around to save other lives in peril. You’re protected, it’s as simple as that. You’re its home now. Try to send the lion to an unrightful owner to save him from death, and darkness will descend. A life will be taken for every life saved, I tell you. Pass it around, and those you protect really will be cursed.”

  “I’m already cursed, you madman!” I screamed.

  Mr. H looked at me with a stare that indicated he feared he’d chosen badly, as if he worried I was going to fail him. But he was wrong about me. My cowardice would prove helpful. The black lion has slept well for a hundred years. He’ll sleep a thousand more before I’m through. I’m not going anywhere.

  After a long pause of thoughtful reflection, Mr. H opened the journal he’d been holding and flopped it open in my direction.

  “This is the Isengrim,” said he. What new madness was this?

  “If you make some mistakes… you’ll need to contain the damage.”

  “Good Lord,” I said. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  He tore the pages from the journal violently and threw them in my face. I glan
ced at the indecipherable drawings for what might be—I could only imagine—some sort of contraption of the devil.

  “I’ve used the power to thrill the world. You have the unfortunate appearance of a cowardly fool! What was I thinking?”

  “Yes, by all means, what were you thinking? Take it back, you monster!”

  A hundred years later, I can still see his eyes, so very tired. Looking back now, I see that he nearly did ask for it back. How many times had he cheated death over the years with every manner of elaborate escape?

  I’ve kept the drawings for the Isengrim, his greatest escape trick never performed. I’ve even had it built, God knows why. What possible use could it have?

  Unfortunately I never had a chance to ask Mr. H myself. He raced on to the Garrick Theatre in Detroit, where he performed his last show.

  A week later Houdini was dead.

  His last words, or so I was told by those who would know, were harrowing.

  “And in my dream I saw a black lion of death coming to take me away.”

  This is the end of what I know. I have been careful. I have not let the black lion out. He is quiet, mostly, these many years. I often wonder if I dreamed the whole thing. I have only one worry in life, and it keeps me mostly to myself.

  Will I ever say those words, and let the black lion out?

  I didn’t even realize I’d been standing the whole time I read until the weight of the message hit me and I slumped onto a stool at the bar. I sat there, numb to the world, as I thought about the horrible mistakes we’d made.