The Museum of Extraordinary Things(10)

The dog crashed through the underbrush. Coralie could hear him racing behind her. She did her best to outpace him as she tore through the brambles, but in no time the creature was at her heels. She turned, afraid she might be attacked from behind. Her blood felt hot within her chilled flesh as she steeled herself, ready to be bitten. She knew how red her blood was, how on fire despite how waterlogged she was. The pit bull’s ears and tail were cut to nubs, and he had a compact, muscular body. Coralie expected him to leap at her, foaming at the mouth; instead he wagged his rear end and gazed up at her, utterly foolish and friendly. This was no vicious beast, only man’s best friend.

“Go away,” Coralie whispered.

“Mitts!” the man shouted through the woods. “Damn it! Get back here!”

The dog panted and wagged, sniffing around his quarry, ignoring Coralie’s attempts to urge him away. She waved at him and hissed beneath her breath.

“Mitts, you idiot!” the young man called.

The dog was torn between his great find and his loyalty to his master. In the end he turned and crashed back into the underbrush. Through the fluttering leaves, Coralie could now fully see the man. His face was all angles, with a worried expression and broad, sensitive features. His wide mouth broke into a grin as soon as he spied his dog. “There you are.” He sank down to pet the dog with tenderness, and the beast responded by leaping and licking his master’s face. “Are you aiming to get yourself lost?”

Coralie felt something pierce through her, as if she were a fish on a hook, unable to break free. She felt a tie to the stranger, drawn to his every movement. Without thinking of the consequences, she shadowed him when he returned to his camp. Despite the dog, she crept closer. The young man had been cooking two striped bass over the smoky fire, one for himself and another for his dog, whom he fed before taking his own dinner. He called the dog an imbecile, but he set out a bowl of fresh water and petted the pit bull’s wide head again. “Dummy.” He laughed. “Are you looking to be a bear’s dinner?”

A large camera had been placed atop a folded overcoat so that it might be sheltered from the wet ferns and damp soil. He was a photographer as well as a fisherman. Then what would he see if he looked at her through the lens? Gray eyes, long glossy hair falling down her back, the scales of a sea monster painted upon her skin. A liar, a cheat, and a fraud. He would see that and only that, for, as the Professor had warned her, what men imagined, they most assuredly found. Coralie wished she were nothing more than a lost woman, someone he could share his supper with, but she was something more. She was her father’s daughter, a living wonder, an oddity no common man could ever understand.

Navigating through the brambles, shielding her face from the thorns, she found her way back to the river. She heard footsteps following her. For an instant she felt a sort of thrill, as if she wished to be discovered. But when she turned it wasn’t the man from the campfire. Her heart sank, for there in the undergrowth was the shadowy form of a large, gray beast. For an instant, Coralie thought it was a wolf. In the fairy tales she had loved as a child, the villain was always punished, granted the fate he or she deserved. She flushed to think of the evil she had done in the world, the trickery and masquerades. She had seen to her father’s bidding without question or remorse. Perhaps this was her rightful fate, to be eaten alive by a fierce beast, a proper penance for her crimes. She closed her eyes and tried to still her heart. If her life was over, so be it. She would be nothing but glimmering bones scattered beneath the brambles, and the strands of her hair would be taken up by sparrows to use in their nests.

The wolf stood in a hollow, eyeing her, but she must have appeared worthless, for it shifted back into the woods.



A mist was fluttering through the trees when she at last reached the appointed meeting place. Coralie was stone-cold, and yet she was possessed by a rising tide of emotion that coursed through her with its own brand of heat. She realized there was only one explanation for what she’d felt as she’d hidden behind the tree in her sopping clothes, watching the young man, her heart pounding. Maureen had told her that love was what a person least expected. It was not an appointment to keep or a trick or a plan. It was what she had stumbled upon on this dark night, without any warning.

When Coralie saw her father pacing beside the carriage, she felt the sting of resentment. The Professor had never raised a hand to her, but his disapproval was wounding and he would not be happy to have been kept waiting till dawn. Starlings were waking in the bushes even though the last of the stars were still strewn across the sky. Coralie often wondered if her father truly cared for her, or if perhaps another girl in her place would have suited him just as well.

“There you are!” the Professor shouted when Coralie appeared. He rushed forth with a blanket to quickly wrap around her shoulders. “I thought you had drowned.”

The Professor hurried her into the carriage. The liveryman, who was often overpaid to buy his silence, would likely demand double for this journey, for it would be bright morning by the time they reached Brooklyn. There would already be crowds on the Williamsburg Bridge, men and women walking to work on this blue March day, unaware that a monster passed by them, and that she wept as she gazed out the window of the carriage, wishing that she might be among them and that her fate might at last be her own.





TWO



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