The Man Who Cheated Death

Chapter 27 Buried Alive

Death had found a new friend, the wrecking ball machine, courtesy of the Amarillo Brothers Construction Company. To hell with guns and big knives; here was the true weapon of choice, capable of knocking down tall buildings with a few well placed whacks.

The building started to crumble. He kept at it, unconcerned about the two people inside. With each direct hit, the ground around him shook, letting him experience the profound aftershock of his own devastation. Picking up the bullhorn lying on the floor, he held it to his lips.

“Having fun in there?” he shouted.

He kept one eye on the front door. He had made sure the other exits were locked from the outside. Hardare and his bride had only one avenue of escape, and it was through that door.

“Anybody home?” he shouted.

He grasped the lever that activated the wrecking ball and made it swing forward. He hesitated, eyes searching for the uneven bricks on the building’s side which outlined the stairwell’s location, then decided to aim at the first floor, and see if he could make the building come down.

“Eugene! Over here!”

The voice jolted him. Hardare stood in a window on the second floor, waving his arms. Death spun the cumbersome wheel and made the crane tilt upward.

“Lights out!” he yelled into the bullhorn.

“Too slow!” Hardare yelled back.

As Death began to pull the lever, he blinked in disbelief. Hardare was no longer in the window, but now stood at another apartment window, over twenty feet away.

“Come on, you hairless freak!”

Clapping his hands, Hardare melted from view. A split-second later the magician reappeared in the first window.

“Fuck me,” Death said, no longer believing his eyes.

The words carried over the bullhorn.

“That’s right, fuck you,” Hardare called back.

A movement caught Death’s eye. Jan had run out the front door of the apartment house, and was heading for the street. They had tricked him, and like a fool, he’d fallen for it. It only made his desire to kill Hardare that much stronger.

He aimed the ball at the arches by the front door. He couldn’t tell if they were real, or fake, and decided to find out, taking them down with one fell swoop of the ball.

The ground around him shook. Half of the first floor had caved in, the building now sagging under its own weight. He had hit a main support.

The apartment house began to groan. Death jumped out of the cab to watch its demise. The collapse began at the building’s center, the floors falling in upon each other, spitting black and gray spirals of dust hundreds of feet into the air, the accumulating weight causing a great roar as the bottom floors flattened out and turned the five-story structure into a gigantic pile of rubble and jagged steel in a matter of seconds.

“Goodbye, Mr. Magico,” he said.

As he sprinted down to the bottom floor, Hardare saw the front entrance to the apartment cave in, and his chances for survival diminish. Spinning around, he ran to the rear of the dying building, looking for another way out.

But there was none. The windows were boarded shut, the back door padlocked from the outside. His lock picks did him little good if he didn’t have a keyhole to stick them in.

He retreated to the stairwell, thinking he might still be able to go up, find a hole in a wall that had crumbled, and make a jump for it. The apartment house emitted a sickening groan. Looking up, he saw a gigantic crack split the ceiling apart. He felt his knees grow weak and his spirits fail; there was no place left to run, no last-second miracles to pull out of his back pocket. He was done.

Half the ceiling came down, missing him by a few feet. He teetered backwards into a wall and tried to stay upright. He felt a board in the wall spring open, and stuck his hand into it. It was a laundry chute. Having no other place to turn, he dove headfirst down the narrow, pitch black shaft.

It was a tight, harrowing ride. A concrete wall met him at its end, and he felt a stabbing pain in his forehead, then an odd sense of nirvana, as if he were floating on the crest of a blackened wave. After a while, the moldy stench of rotted laundry brought him up from the depths, and he managed to open his eyes, and still see nothing.

He heard his cell phone ringing in his pocket. He pulled it out. Caller ID said Unknown.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Oh my god, you’re alive!” Jan said elatedly.

“Alive and kicking. Where are you?”

“I’m standing outside with a couple of policemen. They called the excavation company to come dig you out.”

“That’s great. Tell the excavation guys I’m trapped in the basement.” He paused. “Any sign of Osbourne?”

“No. He escaped.”

The laundry room had begun to vibrate. Above him came a deafening pounding, and he imagined the different floors crashing in, one atop the other, not unlike the footage of condemned buildings being imploded that TV news programs found so appealing.

“Got to go,” he said.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He folded his phone and stuck it in his pocket. A rumbling sound was coming from the laundry chute. All at once he realized what it was: falling debris. Using the palms of his hands, he felt his way across the wall and quickly found the mouth of the chute, the debris gushing out like running water. Balling up a moldy sheet, he stuffed it into the chute as tightly as possible.

It didn’t work. The chute spit up its plug, and a wave of new debris sent an invisible, toxic cloud across the room, the dirt rising around his waist like quicksand.

He began to climb, his feet slipping and sliding. Two steps up, one step back, trying desperately not to fall. Finally the rock slide stopped, the laundry room almost filled. Lying on the tip of the pile, he felt around with his hands, trying to picture in his mind how much space, and breathing time, was left. There were two feet clear above his head, and an arm’s length to either side. About the size of two coffins, he thought.

He tried to guess how long it would take an excavation team to dig him out. At least an hour, he decided. There wasn’t nearly enough air in the laundry room for him to survive.

He lay in the darkness and tried not to panic. If he’d learned anything as an escape artist, it was that there was always a way out, even if the method was not always apparent. Houdini had figured that out early in his career, and escaped from situations that no one before or since had managed to do.

Many of Houdini’s escapes had never been fully explained. One was called “Buried Alive.” Put in a coffin and lowered into a grave, his uncle had stayed underground for an hour, a baffling feat considering a normal coffin held two minutes of air.

Hardare had assumed that his uncle a hidden oxygen inside the coffin. That belief had later been shattered when he’d read an entry in Houdini’s diary describing how the escape worked.

“When I go under,” Houdini wrote, “I am awake but not conscious. I float on the edge of what is real, and some removed area of the imagination. The sensation is what I suppose the French call surreal. It is strange, and often frightening.

“The secret is simple. I drop my heart beat, breathe as little as possible, and put myself into a trance. How this works is something I do not profess to understand.

“This escape is dangerous, but will remain in my repertoire. There are times in an escape artist’s life that the ability to conserve air can mean the difference between life and death.”

Hardare shifted on the rocks. Going under had worked for Houdini, and it might just work for him.

Shutting his eyes, he forced himself to relax.

His mind became an empty screen. Soon the laundry room became filled with flickering yellow stars that reminded him of a planetarium, and he watched them grow brighter and expand.

A gray, menacing fog carried him into space. Soon the fog dispersed, and he saw infinite space both above and below him. He looked at his hands and saw they were shining brightly, his skin as luminous as a full moon.

Suddenly he began to fall. Slowly at first, then faster, his body plunging at a speed so great that a child-like terror overcame him. His heart raced furiously as he dropped through the dark abyss, and fought off the overwhelming desire to fill his lungs with precious air.

His fall ended unexpectedly, his terror mercifully abated, and he found himself standing on solid ground, again immersed in gray fog. He heard cries, and women’s tortured voices. They seemed to come at him from everywhere at once. It grew unbearable, and he covered his ears with his hands.

The fog dissipated, and he saw dozens of women standing around him. There were women of every age, shape, and physical description, even hardened women from the street. They were miserable creatures, their faces racked by suffering. They formed a circle around him, and he spun around on his heels, looking for a single familiar face among them.

A tall black woman touched his arm. Her face was the one of the most frightening things he’d ever seen, her mouth twisted grotesquely as if by a wire. She put her hand beneath his chin and brought his head up, making him look. Ashamed, he stared into her face without flinching.

“Help us,” she whispered.

She had been normal once, he could see that behind the distortion. Normal, maybe even attractive. But who was she?

He felt another hand, then another. From the second and third row of the circle the women reached out to lay a hand someplace upon his body, some kneeling to touch his legs, their hands touching everywhere. He watched as women in the front gave up their spots so others could take their place and touch him.

A teenage girl who could have been his daughter’s twin came forward. Strawberry blond hair, aqua blue eyes, cute dimples. He had seen her before, and struggled to remember from where. Then it hit him. Her name was Lori Appleby, and her photo had been in the log of Death’s victims which Wondero had shown him.

Appleby edged closer. Several women moved aside, allowing her to stand next to him. She placed her hand on his sleeve. Then her eyes found his face.

“You’ve got to stop him,” she said. “We can’t leave if you don’t.”

It took a moment for her words to sink in. When they did, he felt tears run down his face and he began to cry, his chest heaving with the knowledge that each and every one of these women had been real, just like himself. His heart ached for Appleby and all the women here: for their club of lost souls.

Hardare gasped for air. He began to weaken and felt Appleby and the others tighten their hold on him, and lift him cleanly over their shoulders. In the dark infinity above him, he saw a tiny sliver of light. With both arms he reached toward it, praying it was his salvation.