Saving Houdini Read Online Free PDF Page A

all the way. There was something else in there. Dash pulled the clipping out and saw that there was also a small, white card. There was a message on it, a
typed
message. Dash had never seen actual typewriting before. It said:
    IF YOU WOULD LIKE, PLEASE JOIN US TOMORROW AT 4 O’CLOCK. 64 ARUNDEL AVENUE. THERE WILL BE SNACKS AND LEMONADE.
    He turned the card over. Blank. Whoever had sent this envelope didn’t want him to know who they were. But why would someone invite him over without telling him who they were?
Very
creepy.
    Dash slumped against his bedroom wall. None of this made any sense. He didn’t
know
anyone in 1926, and no one knew him. Maybe it was a trap. If you were alone in the past and got into trouble, there wouldn’t be anyone to help you or even miss you. They could do whatever they wanted to you.
    If you would like.
Strange thing to say. He got sent back almost a hundred years and the only thing anyone had to tell him wasn’t all that urgent?
    After a while, he moved to the middle of the room and stood there. He closed his eyes and again imagined the room as he knew it. Then he opened them and aimed his palm at the ceiling, feeling the weight of an invisible tennis ball in his hand. Hefting it once, twice, he launched it toward the basket.
Alley-oop. Tonk.
Off the door jamb and through the net. Then
pok pok pok
as the ball bounced back to him.
    One more minute, Dash, then I want you to stop!
His mother’s voice.
    The phantom ball moved in a graceful arc through the air and back to his hand. He let his arms fall to his sides and stared at the door to the empty closet, the house enveloping him in its strange silence. He lowered his head. He wouldn’t have wanted you to know this, but he wept.

5
    Dashiel Woolf had a pain in his belly that was like the blast radius of an exploding black hole. It was impossible to ignore. He needed food.
    He’d woken up on the floor of his (future) bedroom, still in 1926, his suit jacket folded to make a pillow for his head. He looked out the window: it seemed to be mid-morning already. Amazing to think that even in the midst of a calamity, he could still sleep in.
    He put his jacket on, stuffing his tie into the pocket. Every male person he’d seen on the streets of Toronto the previous evening had been wearing a suit jacket of some kind. Thank goodness his mother had forced him to put on a suit for Bloom’s show! He couldn’t imagine showing up here in a skateboarding T-shirt. But his own suit jacket was somewhat worse for wear after being slept on, and if he was going to be here for any length of time, he was going to have to get clothes that looked a little more like the strangely stiff-looking suits made of rough fabricworn here. And a pair of those crummy shoes too. His shoes were too good.
    But clothing and food was going to take money, and he had none.
    Wait. He had
some
food!
    He dug into his pocket. The wine gum was still there. He pulled it out and picked the lint off it. It was an orange one. Orange was like orange
juice.
And it was, after all, breakfast time. He popped it into his mouth. It was still fresh! He heard his father in his head, comically chiding him:
Fresh? You could bury a pack of those until after the apocalypse then dig ‘em up, and they’d be exactly the same.
    Ha. Good one, old man.
That’s what Dash would’ve said.
Good one.
    At this hour, his father would be mumbling as he tried to get out of bed. He wasn’t a morning person. “It’s genetic,” he’d once said to Dash. “Runs on the male side. Embrace it.” His father would be waking up just around the corner from where Dash was sitting right now.
    That would be a morning in his
real life.
He didn’t know what
this
was, but whatever it was, a single wine gum was not going to get him through it.
    He went down the stairs into the echoing front hall and left the house. Standing on the sidewalk, he stared up. The brightly coloured tree canopy seemed to be holding the blue sky