Born of Illusion by Teri Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

the future. I shut my eyes and tremble as the truth settles more deeply into my soul. My body had been used by a boy who had died during the Great War. He’d used the Ouija board to send a message from beyond the grave.
    I can do what so many say is impossible—I can communicate with the dead. My stomach rolls and I hurry to my room.
    Once there, I shut the door and wedge a chair under the handle. With that done, I kneel and pull out several large hatboxes from under my bed. The first one contains a dozen or so handcuffs and a ring of keys and picklocks. I have several Giant Bean handcuffs from the 1880s that all open with the same key. Silly. Then a pair of Iver Johnson cuffs with their funny round keys, and a pair of Lovell cuffs. I can get out of all of them with the picklock, no matter how I’m cuffed. I also have a special pair for Mother that have been gaffed, so they’re easy for her to open. They’re used to fasten her to the chair in the spirit cabinet. She doesn’t know about the rest of them and I want to keep it that way. It would give her too much satisfaction to know that I share the same obsession as my father.
    Of course, it’s lucky for her that I do. I was thirteen the first time I broke my mother out of jail. After that it got easier, though I have to admit, even I had trouble getting the door unlocked while hanging off the back of a paddy wagon. It’s not an experience I wish to repeat.
    I don’t even recall which small town it was, but I do remember how terrified I was as I hid behind a truck and waited for the paddy wagon to pass. They hadn’t placed a guard with my mother, figuring that one pretty little woman wouldn’t give them any trouble. As soon as the timing was right, I leaped, as quiet and quick as a cat, onto the back. I’d clung to the bars, and remember thinking that my mother, in her champagne-colored lace dress, was too beautiful to be stuck in the back of a police wagon.
    “Mama,” I’d called softly, to let her know it was time to go.
    “What took you so long?” was all she said as she removed her shoes to make the jump to the street easier.
    I was already working on the padlock and didn’t answer. It took two tries but I soon pulled the lock out and the door opened.
    I pray that’s the last time I’ll have to do that.
    I sigh and move on to the next box, which contains the straitjacket I bought from a homeless man in Kansas City. I shudder to think where he got it and remember how long it took me to learn to escape from it. Swineguard the Magnificent helped me in and out of it for weeks before I finally had it down pat. Mother doesn’t know about that either.
    Then, slowly, I remove the cover from a box filled with newspaper clippings on my father’s many exploits. A familiar sadness takes over, the same childlike yearning that has been with me since I first realized my father couldn’t possibly want me. If he did, I would be with him, right?
    I stare down at a handbill I’d picked up in San Francisco when the circus was doing a California tour. Harry Houdini’s fierce eyes stare back at me. “Did I get this curse from you?” I whisper to the most famous magician and escape artist in the world.
    Because I don’t want it. Any of it. Not the visions of the future, not feeling the emotions of others, and certainly not the ability to talk to the dead. All I’ve ever wanted was to be a regular girl with a regular life. Talking to the dead or seeing the future cannot, in any way, be considered normal.
    As I tuck the handbill back in the box and shove it all back under my bed, a band of pain tightens around my chest like a straitjacket.
    My father wouldn’t know me if he passed me on the street.
    He has never claimed me for his own.
    He doesn’t even know I exist.
    But I can’t help but wonder, as I ready myself for bed, if my abilities are the curse I must bear as Harry Houdini’s illegitimate daughter.

Six
     
    I n spite of my exhaustion, it takes forever for