Dreamland Social Club(11)
They each took slices and ate them in silence. Jane’s thoughts returned to her homework, to her Topsy essay. Why had she watched that film? Was it the same reason people used to go to see premature babies in incubators?
“Why do you think that guy said that?” she asked her brother. “About Preemie.”
“I have no idea.” He took yet another slice and got up, picking his backpack up off the floor and leaving the room. “Maybe Preemie was a piece of shit,” he called from down the hall.
The remnants of a hurricane blew through the city that night—rain pounded Preemie’s shingled roof and rattled and whooshed all the windows. Marcus braved the weather to go off to meet his new friend and so, with her father also out, Jane alone set out to find more of Preemie’s personal stuff and see if she could decide for herself whether he was a piece of excrement or not. Ideally, she’d find some stuff that belonged to her mom, something more interesting than a mermaid doll music box that didn’t actually play any music.
So when she noticed the string dangling from the ceiling in the upstairs hall, she pulled it. A series of stairs popped down and she climbed slowly, frantically swatting away cobwebs, and then stepped up into the attic, barely lit by the glow of a streetlight coming in the small window. When she found another string to pull, light left her face-to-face—she gasped!—with a huge red demon with eyes as big as her face. Carved out of a large piece of wood and painted a menacing red and black, it leaned against the main wall at the back of the house, beside the window that looked out onto the yard.
What on earth?
The room the demon guarded was long and skinny, with exposed rafters and a peaked ceiling. The wood planks that made up the floor had once been painted gray but were now chipped to reveal their original oak color. There were boxes everywhere and books stacked into jagged piles, and an old movie projector appeared when Jane pulled away a dusty old sheet.
She sifted through a stack of books, then sat in a worn dark blue armchair and read everything she could find about Preemie and Dreamland and the doctor who had blazed the incubator trail. People apparently had thought he was a quack, but Jane, having also been born early enough that she needed some additional cooking, knew that wasn’t the case.
Along the way she learned that the “preemie” display wasn’t the only weird thing about Dreamland. There had also been a ride called Creation that took people through the events of the book of Genesis and the very creation of the earth. There’d been one called Fighting Flames, where people could watch a tenement fire be put out, which seemed a little bit twisted; then again she’d willfully watched the execution of an elephant. Guests could also watch a reenactment of the Boer War, which she was pretty sure had taken place in Africa. Or go to a Dog and Monkey Show, whatever that was. There was even an entire village, Midget City, populated by a thousand dwarfs.
She paused to think about that one.
Midget City?
They actually lived there? In the amusement park? And people went there to watch them go about their daily lives?
She suddenly didn’t feel quite so bad about watching the Topsy film.
She found pictures of the demon against the wall guarding the entrance to an attraction called Hell Gate—a boat ride through a re-creation of Hades. So Preemie was either an amateur museum curator or a professional thief. Whether or not that made him a piece of excrement, she wasn’t sure.
When she confirmed what her father had already told her—that Dreamland had all burned to the ground one night in 1911, on the eve of opening day of the season, never to be rebuilt—she couldn’t help but wonder whether the midgets had had something to do with it.
Flipping to the index again, she hoped to find something about a Dreamland “social club,” something she’d missed the first time around. Sure enough, there was a separate line entry, and she turned to the page.
The photo there, dated August 13, 1924, contained about thirty or so people—black, white, tall, small, normal-looking, freaky, the works—behind a sign, propped by their feet, that said DREAMLAND SOCIAL CLUB. A large woman had a miniature man propped on her shoulder, and a girl in a white dress and hat perched on a chair had no arms or legs.
No arms or legs.
Which meant no hands, no feet.
Limbless.
How could you even live?
Most of the people looked normal, though Jane had to wonder what oddities the picture simply couldn’t reveal. The caption next to the photo said only, “Performers from the Dreamland Circus Sideshow gathered at Stauch’s,” so there were probably sword swallowers, fire-eaters, snake charmers, and more. Reading the text on the page, she found no more information about any “club.”
Again and again she returned to that one girl’s face—so pale and young—and studied the people sitting around her. Were they her friends? Had she had any? And was the Dreamland Social Club at school related to this one?
Jane read about another famous park, Steeplechase, where the signature ride was a track where you could race mechanical horses, like you were the jockey. There’d been a human roulette wheel, too, and Jane studied the pictures of people splayed out on a big disc and tried to imagine how it worked, how it felt to spin and spin. People who came off the wheel were then subjected to something called the Blowhole Theater, where a dwarf with an electric prong gave men a zap as the women stepped over a platform that blew up their skirts. A few hundred people could gather in the theater’s bleachers to watch.