The Museum of Extraordinary Things (15 page)

There was to be a full moon, perfect conditions for his plan, although the river was running quite high. At this time of year, the murky spring currents carried roots and fallen trees and all manner of man-made items that had been frozen into the ice upstate and had recently been freed in the thaw. As the Professor prepared the monster’s mask, Coralie went to the grassy bank to remove her coat and her shoes. The chill of the air felt like pinpricks. She stretched, as she always did before a long swim, then practiced her breathing technique. The liveryman was nearby, letting the carriage horse graze. Coralie stole a glance and noticed he was staring into the woods. When she followed his gaze, she spied a large gathering of blackbirds, a hundred or more fluttering through the trees. She wondered if this was an omen, and if she should fear its meaning or be relieved.

“So many,” she said, marveling at the birds, forgetting she was not allowed to address the hired man. “I wonder if they speak to each other, like men and women, or if their calling goes unanswered.”

The hired man buttoned his jacket, as if this might make their conversation more acceptable. “Men and women rarely speak to each other, though they often talk.”

They were out of the Professor’s hearing and sight, so Coralie continued. “People might speak freely if they didn’t fear one another’s judgments.”

“Then let me speak freely,” the liveryman said. There were scars on his face and neck, hastily sewn by a surgeon who certainly couldn’t be called a credit to his profession. “I don’t think you should swim tonight.”

Coralie found she wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable conversing with this man, even though Maureen had confided he’d once been the boss of one of the toughest gangs in lower Manhattan, willing to go up against some of the established Italian gangsters of the Cosa Nostra and the Black Hand, who were so numerous Prince Street was called Black Hand Street. The liveryman had been to prison before coming to work as the Professor’s driver, a humbled man who’d done far too much damage when he was young, to others and to himself.

“Blackbirds can sense danger,” the hired man went on. “You’ll never see one in a storm. They take flight long before the first raindrops fall.” He whistled a trilling call. Soon enough one of the blackbirds came to perch on the branch of a nearby sycamore tree.

“You can speak to him!” Coralie was charmed.

The hired man admitted that he’d kept pet birds for a good part of his life, mostly bright parakeets and parrots from South America, along with his beloved pigeons. “A bird will never lie, just as a man will rarely tell the truth. That’s been my experience and no one will convince me otherwise. So I’ll speak as the birds do, with honest intent. The river looks rough, miss. It’s running wildly and it’s dangerous. An experienced sailor could drown in such conditions. I wouldn’t send my daughter into it, if I were lucky enough to have one.”

The Professor was approaching, and the two who had been speaking in confidence stepped away from one another. Not quickly enough, however. Sardie had taken note of their conversation, and he threw his employee a dark look. He then drew Coralie aside. “Did I tell you not to speak to him? He’s a criminal, Cora. I’m giving him a second chance, but be warned. He has killed more men than you will ever meet in your lifetime.”

Coralie gazed at the hired man, who held his horse’s reins as he whispered in the beast’s ear. She had a surge of trust in his judgment.

“The water’s so wild, Father. I wonder if we should put off this swim.”

“Is that what that fool told you? He has absolutely no idea of who you are and what your training has been. I’m not the least bit worried. This is your farewell to the Hudson River. Once it’s over and done, I swear I’ll find a creature worthy of the news you create.” He kissed her on both cheeks. “You’re not a coward, are you? Tell me I didn’t waste all this time on you?”

Convinced she had no choice, Coralie went to the water line and waded out. When she was to her waist, she dove in, grateful for the silence of the river, which was broken only by the slap of the waves as she cut through the water. She felt herself taken up by the north-flowing current, which was indeed moving quickly, but she enjoyed the effortlessness of her swim and went where the river led her. The moon had slipped behind clouds, and Coralie came up beside a rowboat, unnoticed in the dark. As she paddled beside the skiff, she heard two men speak of their wives and of the fish they meant to bring home to them for supper. She wondered what it might be like to have a husband who spoke of you so tenderly.

She’d been instructed to draw blood as any true beast would, but Coralie had forgotten her orders. It seemed as if she had entered into a dream, spellbound by her own thoughts. Mist rose from the water in bursts of cloudy air. There was a run of sturgeon, large fish known to bite, but they ignored Coralie and swam along beside her. It was possible that they thought she was one of their own kind, as much a fish as she was a woman. As she was carried upstream, she imagined the young man, though Maureen had warned against this. She might have gone on floating for hours more, but all at once she hit something straight on. She was suddenly and achingly present. She wondered if she had collided with a sturgeon, for the thing she’d been driven into was large, yet more pliable than a log. When she gathered her wits, she spied what she believed to be a fish nearly her own size floating before her, pale blue in the muddy water. Both Coralie and this creature had become enmeshed in a soup of floating debris.

She had already passed the cliffs of the Palisades, which she recognized from her previous swim. She’d entered into the dangerous flux where the Harlem River was aswirl with eddies as the north and south currents met, and had been caught up in waterweeds, long wavering plants whose roots reached hundreds of feet below the surface. The tendrils held fast, pulling her down so that she took in mouthfuls of water. The fish trapped with her was immobilized, not able to struggle for its life as Coralie did. Without thinking, she grabbed on to the fish and tried to pull herself up so that she wouldn’t be dragged into the center of the whirlpool. She had expected cool, slippery scales; instead there was the woolly nub of sopping fabric. All at once she realized she was holding on to a drenched coat. In her arms was the body of a young woman, facedown, long pale hair flowing, arms and legs entangled in the ropes of waterweeds.

In a panic, Coralie reached for the knife in her pocket and set to work frantically chopping at the dark, slimy tendrils that had wound around them, freeing herself first. She continued to hack through the weeds, managing to tug the other girl from the grip of the twisted greenery. The two slipped underwater for one terrifying moment. Coralie could see her companion’s pale hair drifting out. When she realized that she was being pulled down by the weight of the unconscious girl, she began to kick furiously, releasing them from the whirlpool, swimming against the currents, hauling the other woman along. Once she reached the shore, Coralie couldn’t catch her breath, which rasped inside her. She forced herself to crawl over the grass and the stalks of milkweed, the roots of which the Lenape Indians used to cure fever but which now tore at her hands as she pulled the other woman through the weeds. When she could go no farther, she let go of the stranger she’d rescued and lay beside her on the ground, exhausted. Her lungs hurt from the effort. She shivered uncontrollably, and yet, she had never felt as alive. Above them the sky was endless, flecked with bright stars.

“We’re safe,” she said.

The young woman beside Coralie was unresponsive. It was possible that she had hit her head or swallowed too much water. The enormity of Coralie’s responsibility burst upon her.

“Hello!” she shouted into the woods. “Can anyone hear me?”

She prayed the young man would be nearby and hear, but her own voice echoed back and no response came, aside from the fluttering of birds in the thornbushes, awakened from sleep by her frightened cries. The birds rose like a plume of smoke, disappearing into the blue-black sky.

The rescued woman was the same age as Coralie, or a little younger. Peering through the dark, Coralie saw that she was quite beautiful. She also noticed a widening splash of blood upon the stranger’s chest. She gasped, thinking her charge had been seriously wounded, then realized it was she herself who bled. She had caught her wrist on something sharp, perhaps a rock, or her own knife as she hacked through the weeds.

Coralie drew herself up to kneel beside the other girl. All she could hear was her own ragged breathing. There was a fluttering inside her, a wild emotion she couldn’t temper. She leaned over the girl, placing her ear to the sopping coat. The fabric had once been sky blue, but soaking wet it had turned the color of ink. Coralie had no idea how a heart was supposed to sound; all she could hear was the deafening thrum of her own heart in her ears. But she knew that flesh should not be blue and arms and legs should not be rigid. The girl’s head had fallen to the side, as if she were a doll. Coralie reached to take the drowned girl’s hand, but it was tightly clenched. She held a finger to the girl’s mouth to test for breath. There was none; the girl’s lips were blue, her mouth clamped shut.

At last, Coralie wrenched to her feet, knees shaking. She felt the other girl’s death inside her own body, a stone of grief in her throat. Acting on instinct, she ran. She blindly went toward the river. In the woods there were flashes of what appeared to be bright globes of light: migrating yellow warblers flinging themselves through the gloom. Coralie raced on, past some fishermen in a skiff, who spied her and called out. She continued through the brambles. She was too removed from the world of the living to communicate with human beings. Yet she could feel her heart banging against her ribs as she ran, letting her know that she was still alive.

She came upon the carriage in the dark. The wound on her hand was deep enough so that blood continued to rush forth, staining her white blouse. Perhaps she appeared to be a monster when she approached her father, for he backed away and did not take her in his arms. Coralie stood there, wringing wet, shivering, her complexion
starkly white beneath the streaks of green paint that had washed onto her cheeks.

The liveryman came to her with a blanket. “Miss, this was a bad night for the river. I told you that.”

Coralie’s father now approached, concerned for their plan. “Have you been found out?”

She shook her head. When she tried to speak, no words were heard, only a croak, as if she had lost her voice in the river. Her face smarted with the cold. The silence of the girl in the blue coat had affected her, chilled her to the core.

The Professor took her arm, demanding to know what had caused her such distress. “This is not a game.” He saw her silence as disobedience. “You’ll tell me directly, or you’ll regret it.”

Coralie’s pale face flushed. “I found a body in the river.” Her voice sounded strangely flat. “I left her in the woods. She drowned.”

Coralie expected her father to berate her, for the dead were not their concern any more than the living were. She presumed he would contend that a corpse in the grass was no different than a child offered for a good price. And yet a strange look began to play upon the Professor’s face, his interest piqued. He asked Coralie to lead them to the place where she’d left the body. The liveryman took them along the road by carriage. Coralie continued to shiver. “The road ends nearby,” she warned. “It’s best we avoid this situation and let the authorities find her.” Once, at the funeral of a living wonder, an old man with warts like a bullfrog’s who had died in his own bed of old age, Maureen had cautioned her that if she should look upon a dead man twice, she would carry him forever. They’d hurried away from the funeral home, but Maureen’s warning had stayed with her. “We should turn back,” Coralie recommended now.

“We’ll go when I say,” her father told her. “Have faith in me.”

At the road’s end, the liveryman tied his horse to the branch of a chestnut tree and they continued on by foot. A few birds sang in the dark, but the quiet was so deep that each branch breaking under the men’s boots echoed as if a rifle had been shot. A thicker mist began to rise off the water, turning the distant shore silver. The air was warmer than the cold, hard ground. The trees were pewter, the ferns black as coal. Confused, Coralie led them in the wrong direction, and then had to backtrack. The Professor grumbled, annoyed to realize she’d taken them in a circle. But Coralie wondered anew whether it might be best if they failed to reach their destination. Possibly she had been wrong and had mistaken exhaustion for death. There might well be nothing for her father to see. Surely it was within the realm of reason to think that the girl had slept for a while in the tall grass after Coralie had run off, then had awoken refreshed. She may have smoothed down her hair, buttoned her blue coat, and arisen from the meadow to walk barefoot through the woods.
You will never believe my dream,
she may have told her parents, waiting at the door, relieved beyond words by her return.
I dreamed I drowned and a girl who was half fish discovered me and brought me to the shore, intent on rescuing me so that I might live and walk on land like any other young woman and be your daughter once again.