The Museum of Extraordinary Things(59)
The evenings were still damp and chilly even though spring had arrived, and the dusk fell in sheets that were mottled and fish colored. Coralie went to the shoreline where she had first learned to swim. The water’s pull was difficult to resist; she could feel it in her blood, stinging like salt. It was here the whole world opened to her, as it always had, in a grid of sand and sea. She had come to believe that if her father had wanted a docile daughter, he should never have allowed her access to the ocean. It was here she found a strength that often surprised her. Perhaps she was not a spineless creature, but a wonder after all. Recently when she gazed into the mirror she believed she spied a series of lines at the base of her throat. Surely they were not the gills she had dreamed of but merely a pattern of throbbing blue veins. Still, she wondered.
The deepening night was soon strewn with stars. The beach, so crowded in summer months it was impossible to walk along without bumping into another beachgoer, was empty, save for the clam diggers, who called to each other from the beds of shellfish as they worked by lantern light. It was low tide, and the air was perfumed with seaweed. As the dark sifted down, Coralie undressed to her undergarments, unlacing her boots so she might leave them behind. She loved the feel of damp sand in the tide, how it tugged at her, pulling her into a world she could sink into. The waves rolled in, and soon enough she was waist deep in water. There was a film of phosphorescence in the water, an illumination caused by tiny fish that were invisible to the human eye, unnoticed in the daylight hours. This was the virtue of the dark: you were who you had always been, only no one could see you.
She was sopping wet, deep in thought. She had stood beside a lion. Perhaps she had more courage than she’d imagined. She dressed and made the walk back home. When she reached the house, she sneaked inside, then left her sandy boots in the hallway and hung her cloak on a brass hook. Water had taught her how to move lightly, and she floated down the hall. The Professor had come up from his workshop and was asleep in the library, exhausted from the trials of his work, sprawled out in a chair. Coralie studied him from the doorway. How deeply he slept, how completely at ease he seemed, as if the world belonged to him and him alone. She drew closer to his sleeping form and leaned down, making no noise as she took the keys from his pocket. She had often sat beside the tortoise and had matched her breathing to echo that of the sea creature’s. She practiced this technique now, slowing her breath and heart and blood.
In the kitchen, the white enameled stove gleamed. A supper Maureen had left for them earlier remained untouched in the cooking pot. Coralie took the cellar stairs in her bare feet. The floor was nothing more than raked dirt, and there were often mice in the corners. An earthy odor of roots mixed with the tang of chemicals. Coralie fitted the two keys into their locks simultaneously and turned them. There were two soft clicks. She let her eyes adjust to the dark before crossing the threshold. Once she was inside the workshop, the scent of formaldehyde was stronger, nearly overpowering. There were rows of teeth in jars set on a shelf alongside dozens of yellowing books. Nearby was the rack of tools, hammers and awls and saws in varying sizes, from one so tiny it could fit in the palm of a child’s hand to an enormous wood saw. Because it was a humid night the cellar was especially damp, the air sweetened with turpentine and wild gum. There was a dark concoction on the desk as well, a sticky tar-like stuff kept in bottles that Professor Sardie rolled into beads to smoke in a pipe that let off a pungent stink.
A wooden crate more than five feet long took up most of the tabletop. As Coralie approached she found herself counting, as if that task would keep her fear at bay. She pushed on the cover so that it slipped forward. Inside, the crate was packed with solid carbon dioxide that appeared as snow. Curls of moisture rose up, which she waved away so she might peer inside. Coralie spied a shimmer of pale hair, the glimmer of flesh. The girl from the river, her blood replaced by formaldehyde, her world reduced to ice. This was her resting place, a box that would have been better used on the docks to pack bluefish or mackerel for delivery to the markets.
Coralie shoved the cover back in place and stood facing away from the coffin, shivering, as if she were the one dressed in chemicals, bloodless and pale. Without another thought, she went to search for the handbook, driven to discover what her father’s plan might be. The room was dark and the items in the drawer were mere shadows to her eyes, but she grasped around until she found what she wanted, her hands fitting over the cover of smooth Moroccan leather. She had wanted to read her father’s diary in its entirety, but there was no time for that. She swiftly thumbed through, finding the last page he’d written upon. The date was this very day, the ink fresh, an indigo blue he favored, the color of water.
Many of the Professor’s notes were in French, and Coralie understood several phrases. Je vais créer ce que je n’ai pas. De chair et le sang. De coeur de l’imagination. But even without written explanations, the ink-stained sketches made his intentions quite clear. He planned to give the city of New York a variation of the trick for which he had been famous, half a woman. This creature, however, would be as monstrous as she was beautiful, a woman joined with a fish, stitched scale to flesh to become a real mermaid, the Hudson Mystery, a far better invention than Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid.
Coralie thought of Maureen’s warning: if you saw the dead twice you were doomed to be haunted. Indeed, the two young women seemed joined by strands of invisible thread, a single being, though one breathed and one was forever still. As Coralie turned to leave, she observed a jumble of belongings on the countertop. A comb, hairpins, a gold locket. She couldn’t bear to see how carelessly these mementos had been tossed into a pile beside surgical tools and bits of bone. She scooped them up, hoping the tokens were so small and unimportant in her father’s eyes he wouldn’t notice their absence.