The Museum of Extraordinary Things(8)
“What will happen to the child?” Coralie asked after they had climbed into the carriage, escaping the stranger’s escalating rage.
“Go on,” the Professor told the liveryman.
Coralie cast a swift backward glance to watch the child dragged away to what was surely a dreadful fate. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had tried to stop children from being allowed to beg, or solicit alms, or be in shows of acrobatics or be included in any immoral or indecent exhibition, especially those presenting an unnatural physical formation. But, in truth, such laws were rarely enforced. Children were not recognized as having rights.
“It’s not our business,” the Professor remarked, sure of himself. “We are here on behalf of science.”
“Perhaps it should be,” Coralie protested. “I could take care of her. It would be no trouble.” The tears that had refused to fall before came freely to her now, though she was quick to wipe them away.
“If you tried to right all the wrongs in the world you’d exhaust yourself in under an hour. This is God’s business.”
“Is it?” Coralie wondered aloud. “Is it not our business to help in God’s work?”
“Our business is to acquire a creature that will draw a crowd, and thereby pay for food and coal and the shoes upon your feet.”
When Coralie strained to see behind them now, the street was empty. The man and his charge had vanished, engulfed by the darkness. It seemed as though they had left God’s sight in this part of the city where human beings were bought and sold as if they were sheep ready for market. “It should be against the law for men to be so cruel,” Coralie pronounced.
“That man is her father.” The Professor turned to his daughter, so that he would not be misunderstood. “And to all the world, he’s well within his rights.”
The Professor had already set in motion his plan for their renewed success. In the first months of 1911 a rumor had begun, one that had been formed inside the Professor’s mind. A monster had settled in the Hudson River, and if a man stood on the banks he might spy it swimming in the dark. Or perhaps it could be sighted at the first light of daybreak, when the water was silver and still. The first to take up the story were two boys fishing for their families’ suppers. They vowed a strange river creature had stolen the catch from their lines; when questioned by the police, each swore it wasn’t a shark, which were abundant in New York Harbor, some reaching fourteen feet long. True, they’d seen a flash of scales set upon the creature’s spine, but it was something entirely different, a being that was dark and unfathomable, almost human in its countenance, with fleet, watery movements. A panic went up. Constables in rowboats patrolled the shores, from the docks downtown all the way up to the Bronx. Several men on the ferries on the four lines which ran from Twenty-third Street to New Jersey leapt into the frigid depths as if they could walk on water, insisting they had heard a woman’s voice call to them, convinced someone had been drowning.
Coralie was the monster that had been sighted from the shoreline, the mysterious creature men wished to either rescue or trap. All she had done was show a glimpse of what might be possible, a waterlogged and furtive river-fiend that had drifted out of nightmares and into the waterways of the city of New York. Seventeen sightings had been recorded in the papers. Each one corresponded to a time when Coralie swam farther north in the cold, gray river, drifting among the eels, just now arising from the sediment after a winter’s sleep, and keeping pace alongside the striped bass that spawned upriver, certain of herself even in uncertain tides. In the mornings she would sit in a pool of sunlight on the back porch so she might read about herself in the Sun or the Times, a huge beast with teeth not unlike a shark’s and green scales, who was in reality nothing more than a hundred-and-twenty-pound girl who favored simple black dresses and leather-buttoned shoes and was never seen without her gloves.
Coralie knew her father was in desperate need of an exhibit that would compete with Dreamland and Luna Park and the other grand amusements in Coney Island. Two years earlier the famous Sigmund Freud had come to Brooklyn, to try to understand the American point of view; among the few things that were said to have impressed him were the magnificent amusement parks. Imagination was all in Brooklyn, and this was what Sardie had to sell; it was his gift, one he thanked his maker for each and every day. He always insisted that his establishment was not a freak show, like the well-known Huber’s Dime Museum on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, which had been a purveyor of the strange and unique for many years until finis was posted on its door in 1910, or the dozens of dreadful little entertainments that lined lower Surf Avenue, exhibitions that debased and degraded their human skeletons and amputees, their conjoined twins and the men who allowed fleas to suck the blood from their bodies, along with the wrestling rings and vaudeville halls, the worst and most exploitive of them having moved northward, to an area known as the Gut. The Museum of Extraordinary Things was a true museum, a place of edification, wherein natural curiosities were displayed along with human marvels. Now, however, they needed more, and, when more could not be found, it must be invented. If there was anyone who might be able to succeed in such an act of trickery, it was the Professor, who had been a magician in France, quite famous in his time, known for acts of wonder so astounding they had made people doubt their own eyes. He understood that not only could a man’s eyes mislead him but his mind could deceive him as well.