The Yggyssey by Daniel Pinkwater Read Free Book Online Page B

sit there waiting for him to get out?" I asked.
    "Well, there would be a band playing," Melvin said.
    "For two hours?" Neddie asked.
    "Sometimes."
    "It must have been some good band," I said.
    "He would also do things like hang upside down by his feet, and get out of a straitjacket and chains. Or he would be tied and chained up and put into a giant milk can full of water, and have to get out before he drowned."
    "At least that would take less than two hours," I said.
    "People had a different idea of what was entertaining back then," Melvin said.
    "I guess."
    "And he had a great and abiding interest in the afterlife. When his mother died, he wanted to contact her—in those days mediums and spiritualists were popular, and people would hold séances, trying to talk to the dead. Houdini went to a few of those, but being a professional
magician, he easily saw through the tricks the mediums used to convince people they were getting messages from their dead relatives.
    "So, Houdini started exposing mediums. He would arrive in a city and go in disguise to the most popular medium, and then he would do a big exposé in the newspaper showing how they used research and confederates to find out things about people who were coming the séance, and all kinds of magician's illusions to make it seem like there were spirits talking. The funny thing is that after he had done this for a while, the mediums would beg him to expose them, because after he left town their business would quadruple because they had been in the newspaper. Never mind that the story told how they were frauds—people would go to them anyway."
    "That's the most interesting thing you've told us yet," Neddie said.
    "Isn't it? Anyway, the whole time Houdini was exposing mediums, he was hoping to meet a legitimate one so he could really contact his mother, or just anybody actually dead. He never found one.
    "Before he himself died, he had made all kinds of arrangements with his wife and his friends. He was going to try to get a signal to them from the other side. They had code words worked out so no fake medium
could claim to have gotten in touch with him, and to this day they hold a séance every Halloween, which is the day he died, and try to get in touch with him.
    "Now here's the part I like. He has been a fairly popular ghost around Hollywood for years, and done some quite good haunting—I've seen him myself any number of times in the ghostly parade, always escaping from something or other—but he has yet to show up at one of those séances they hold in his honor."
    "And now he's gone missing," Neddie said.
    "Yep."
    "And this story you just told us has something to do with how ghosts have been disappearing, and Halloween coming up?" I asked.
    "Well, no, not necessarily," Melvin said. "I just think it's interesting."
    "So, what is it you started out to tell us before you went off into the life and death of Houdini?"
    "Oh! Right! Día de los Muertos," Melvin said.
    "Beg pardon?"
    "Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead," Melvin said.
    "It's Saturday."
    "Isn't that just Mexican Halloween?" I asked.
    "No. It's better," Melvin said. "I suggest you go down to Olvera Street and find out all about it."

CHAPTER 24

Ghostly Halloween
    Before we could go down to Olvera Street and find out about Día de los Muertos, we had to get through regular American Halloween. Neddie, and Seamus Finn, and I were past the age for trick-or-treat, so Halloween would have been a fairly minor holiday for us. We might have gone to a costume party, with the usual bats and witches decorations, and bobbed for apples—reasonably entertaining, but mostly silly—but we knew about ghostly Halloween.
    Now, obviously ghosts are going to take Halloween pretty seriously, wherever they may be, but Halloween in Hollywood—well, the departed just go over the top with it. They make a big effort to outdo the living people. The thing you want to see on ghostly Halloween