by Gina Damico
The woman started flitting about like a hummingbird. She skittered over to Poppy, not touching her, but rather picking and interlacing her curved fingers together as if she were knitting an invisible sweater. “Look at you! High cheekbones. Strong bone structure. Large eyes. Asymmetrical lips.”
Never before had Poppy been greeted with an extensive list of her facial features. She found it unsettling. “Um,” she said, backing away as the woman stood on her tiptoes to examine her more closely. “I think I may have stumbled into the wrong—”
“Stay still, my doll.” The woman spoke with an accent—French, probably. Paraffin wasn’t far from the Canadian border, a fact its citizens were reminded of every summer when Québécois tourists migrated south in flocks. “This won’t take long.”
The glass eyes of the people-shaped figures stared at Poppy while whatever “this” was continued, until she couldn’t take the creepiness anymore and broke away with a full-body shudder. “I’m sorry, but—”
“No, no. It is I who am sorry!” The woman gave a little high-pitched chuckle and backed up, holding her hands aloft in a gesture of benevolence. “I sometimes forget about—what do the kids call it? Personal space.”
“Um. Okay.”
Cocking her head like a bird, the woman observed Poppy with a keen, shrewd stare through a pair of thin-rimmed spectacles that weren’t much bigger than her eyes. A beaky nose jutted out above a pair of pursed lips. She projected a sense of advanced age, yet thick dark brown ringlets framed a face that bore no wrinkles. And she was short—Poppy had at least six inches on her.
The woman started to inch closer again.
And sniff at her.
Poppy flinched. Upon realizing her error, the woman made a tsk noise at herself, gave Poppy a rueful look, and retreated among the figures. “Apologies, my doll. Not so good with people anymore, I am afraid. This place . . . they do not let me out much.”
“That’s probably because they’re an evil candle corporation dead set on destroying the human race’s sense of smell,” Poppy blurted, wasting no time in disparaging the woman’s place of employment.
But if the woman was taken aback, she didn’t show it. Her reaction was the opposite—her mouth opened wide into a smile and her ringlets shook with excitement. “You think so?”
“I—maybe?”
As if she were physically incapable of being still, the woman started fussing with her creations, patting down some hair here, adjusting a scarf there. She was so odd. She stared harder than anyone had the right to stare. She spoke peculiarly. Her birdlike mannerisms were becoming more pronounced by the minute. And yet Poppy felt a strange affinity for the woman, as if she were some long-lost grandmother that her parents had always told her was dead for fear of revealing that mental illness ran in the family.
Ah, she was back to the staring again. “What is your name, my doll?”
“Poppy. Look, I’m sorry for barging in. I’m not supposed to be back here, I know—”
“But you came for the tour! And since you are a girl who disregards signs and barges into places where she’s not supposed to be, that means that what you’ve really come for is the real tour.”
Poppy made a muddled face. Was she scolding her? Or just being blunt?
“Because you are nosy,” the woman added.
Blunt, then.
The woman extended her hand. Here, at last, was proof of her oldness—knobby knuckles, skin paper-thin and liver-spotted. Poppy felt like she was shaking hands with a tree branch.
“I am Madame Grosholtz.”
“Oh. Oh.” Poppy’s eyes went wide. “Sorry I called your factory evil.”
Madame Grosholtz let out a laugh. It sounded like a tangled wind chime. “It is nothing to me, my doll! Just a name. As long as I do what they tell me to do down there,” she said glibly, with a dismissive hand wave toward the floor, “they let me dabble in all the real dabblings up here.”
“Actually,” said Poppy, “I’m here to find out if you . . .”
But she trailed off, unable to work up a fit of righteous indignation. How could she accuse the woman now? Besides, maybe she wasn’t the one who had sculpted the figure in the gazebo; if she had, wouldn’t she have recognized Poppy the moment she entered?
“Do you want to see?” Madame Grosholtz asked, nodding and advancing upon her once again. “My dabblings?”
Poppy gathered from her manic, unblinking stare that the only answer she’d be allowed to give was, “Uh, sure.”
Delighted, Madame Grosholtz clapped her hands twice and scampered off. A second later the room lit up, and Poppy realized how wrong she’d been about the figures. There weren’t just a few.
There were dozens.
Every size, shape, ethnicity. Fat men and skinny men, tall women and short women, happy and sad, from the palest complexion to the darkest shade. The whole of human history on parade: cavemen, bushmen, Vikings, Egyptian Pharaohs, Amazon women, Roman emperors, Mongol invaders, Aztec warriors, European monarchs, founding fathers, rows and rows of figures that Poppy never would have imagined could be rendered at such a level of artistry and skill.
And though the figures were impeccably made, their features weren’t perfect; indeed, it was the astoundingly human imperfections that stole Poppy’s breath away. A woman’s eyes were spaced a shade too far apart; a man’s ears stuck out at odd angles. Freckles and birthmarks were in ample supply. One had a large nose that bore a curiously strong resemblance to Madame Grosholtz’s.
Just when Poppy thought herself incapable of tearing her gaze away from one figure, another would grab it and not let go, gluing her to every minuscule detail. How dynamically their eyes sparkled. How subtly their expressions sat. How natural their poses were, how lifelike. Incredibly, unbelievably real.
As if they’re embalmed, Poppy thought with a surge of dread.
“It is wax,” Madame Grosholtz said reassuringly, as if she’d anticipated the nasty conclusion to which Poppy’s mind had started to slip. “Just wax.”
So, not corpses, then? Poppy made a snorting noise at the thought, then, embarrassed, looked down at her feet, at the shavings of what she’d thought was skin.
Not skin. Wax.
She looked back up at Madame Grosholtz. “They’re amazing,” she said, the word maddeningly inadequate for something so . . . well, amazing. “You made all of these yourself?”
Madame Grosholtz fixed a coy, not-so-humble look on her face. “Yes. I made them.”
“Are they for the diorama?”
“Oh, heavens, no, not for the store. I made those dismal farmers years ago, as a favor, and after that—no more! That place is reserved for soulless blobs of wax, good only for providing light and scents and a false sense of warmth. The empty kind. Here, we make the full kind. Come.”
She beckoned her guest farther into the studio, and Poppy had no time to dissect the woman’s eccentric wording because it was at this point that the theater geek in Poppy went all-out berserk.
The costumes! The props! The stagecraft!
Buckets and cans covered every surface. Many contained paint, judging by the multicolored drippings down their sides; others held startling snippets of anatomy—a jar of fingernails, a tin of teeth, a crock of eyeballs. Hair was also in abundance, with a pegboard of various beards and goatee designs, plus a chorus line of Styrofoam heads sporting wigs of every color and style—wigs that Poppy was sure were made from human hair.
It kind of reminded her of the Gaudy Auditorium slop room—if the Gaudy Auditorium slop room had been pumped full of steroids and sequins and eerie, unblinking glass eyes.
Bolts of fabric—from happy checkered pinks to gritty, threadbare grays—puckered out of shelves behind an ancient sewing machine that Poppy had to physically cross her arms to refrain from caressing. A massive workbench stored drills, chisels, and other tools that would not have been out of place at a dentist’s office.
The bitter scent of lacquer stung the air, but it wasn’t altogether unpleasant—it smelled of dedication, talent, and a lifetime of hard work.
Madame Grosholtz circled the work in progress at the center of the room, a large, muscular man wearing armored pants and holding an ax. A Viking.
Poppy’s eyes bulged at his rippling biceps, his rock-hard abs. The word “huminahuminahumina” came to mind. Yet despite his fierceness, he had a kindness around his eyes, the same kindness she often observed in Mr. Crawford.
“La cire vivante,” Madame Grosholtz whispered.
Poppy was too distracted by the cleft in SexyFace’s chin to fully hear what Madame Grosholtz was saying. She gazed into the man’s eyes, cool, inviting pools of blue that she wanted to dive into and not come up for air and maybe squeeze his butt a little. Only when she started to envision herself crumpling his fur loincloth into a wad did she snap her eyes shut and take a step back. “What?”
“La cire vivante,” Madame Grosholtz repeated.
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”
Madame Grosholtz gave her an amused look but said nothing.
Poppy opened her mouth to defuse the silence, but something made her pause. A shift in the room’s atmosphere, a subtle dislocation—as if she’d had one eye closed since the moment she’d entered the studio and had just now opened it.
“Would you like to know what it means?” Madame Grosholtz said in a slanted tone.
Poppy resolved to keep her breath even, but her heart skipped a bit faster. She stared up at the Viking, at that face that looked more real than the one that looked back at her in the mirror every day. “Yes.”
Madame Grosholtz’s face was indescribable, her eyes flickering like fire. She leaned in and spoke at a whisper.
“The living wax.”
In an instant, everything in Poppy’s body, mind, and soul shrieked at her to flee. Something dark and wrong and heavy had seeped into the room—a profound sense of there is something unnatural going on here that Poppy knew she should run away from—but couldn’t.
She blinked once more at the Viking.
And the Viking blinked back.
6
Lose grip on reality
POPPY GASPED AND STAGGERED BACKWARDS AS IF SHE’D BEEN SHOT. Her legs went rubbery, all the blood rushing out of her feet and turning them numb. A panicked pounding filled her ears, her heart making it plainly obvious that if she had any desire to keep it beating, she needed to get out of there.
But she ignored the advice of her organs. Madame Grosholtz was watching her with a curious expression, while the Viking had gone back to his fearsome, unblinking gaze.
It could have been a trick of the light.
It could have been a mechanical device.
It could have been her imagination.
It could have, but Poppy knew it wasn’t.
Because of all the reactions that might have gone through her head as she processed what had happened, the one that came through the loudest and clearest wasn’t This is impossible or Wax can’t move or even I am losing my goddamn mind.
It was Yes.
Paraffin was unusual—everyone in town knew it but never spoke of it. Never gave voice to that eerie feeling they got when they looked at the factory in the moonlight or smelled the scents that wafted across the lake and bored dark, petrified holes into their psyches. It hid in the shadows, like the legend of the Hollow Ones. Biding its time. Buried so deep that no one would be able to find it without looking, really looking, without picking away at the layers like a vulture gnawing clean the bones of a carcass—
Wait, what?
Poppy gave her head a hard shake.
No.
No eeriness. Nothing unnatural. Just a gritty workshop with a loony old bat who spent way too much time inhaling shellac, and now she was dragging Poppy down into her well of insanity too. Had the last two minutes even happened, or had Poppy imagined them? This was exactly the kind of delirium that had fogged her mind on the Radio City Music Hall stage, and she’d be damned if she was going to succumb to it again.
“Are you all right, my doll?” Madame Grosholtz asked, her face inscrutable.
“Yeah.” Poppy fought to regain a regular breathing pattern. “I thought I—”
Madame Grosholtz now looked concerned. So I did imagine it, thought Poppy. And just like that, all the mysticism of the workshop vaporized with an almost palpable whoosh.
“Nothing,” Poppy said. “I’m fine.”
Things got quiet for a moment. Feeling awkward, Poppy looked down at the paint-spattered floor, at the center of which had been carved the logo of the candle factory.
“You’re that girl, aren’t you?”
Poppy’s head snapped up. “What?”
“The one from the talent show. They gave you that ghastly orange car, no?”
Poppy squeezed her nails into her palms. “Yes. That was me. How did you know?”
“Well. I do have a television.”
Poppy grimaced. She was starting to feel pretty damn silly under the harsh glares of all those glass eyeballs.
She walked toward a section of more contemporary figures. No fur loincloths or togas here, but rather modern clothing that looked as though it had been purchased at the Essex Outlets. They could have easily donned fanny packs and I LO♥ERMONT T-shirts, walked out into the store, and blended right in with the other tourists.
In the corner, several of them lay jumbled in a pile, discarded: a woman with snarled red hair, a teenage boy wearing neon yellow Velcro sneakers, a portly gentleman with an arm broken off at the elbow. “What happened to these guys?” Poppy asked.
“They’re just duds.” Regret passed through Madame Grosholtz’s face, followed by something a bit darker. “Sometimes I think I’m onto it, getting closer, and then . . .”
The look she gave Poppy was laced with a streak of madness. She gave the chubby man’s leg a hard kick—harder than Poppy would have imagined her small frame capable of performing. The leg shattered against the wall, pieces rocketing across the floor.
“It all falls apart,” she said, bitter.
The old wooden floor must have warped over the years, because the man’s big toe kept rolling until it hit the exact center of the room, atop the carved factory logo. For a moment, the only sound in the room was of the toe slowly rolling back and forth across the sunken depression, back and forth, back and forth . . .
“So,” Poppy said before the unease consumed them both, “you do modern-day sculptures too?”
“Yes. Sometimes.”
Poppy took out her cell phone and found the news clip of the gazebo, which was still up on Channel Six’s website—a website maintained by so-called adults who should have known better than to prolong the bullying of a teenager, celebrity or otherwise. “Did you make this?” she asked, showing her the video.
Madame Grosholtz squinted at the screen. For the first few seconds she looked like any other old person attempting to interact with technology, but as soon as the shot zoomed in on the sculpture, her eyes widened and her jaw tensed. “When was this?”
“Last night. Look, it’s not a big deal—trust me, I’ve been through a lot worse. I just came here looking for someone to help me out with a little bit of payback on the kid who did this to me . . .”
Madame Grosholtz had stopped listening. She was urgently darting around the workshop, picking up odds and ends and looking inside paint cans, muttering, “That’ll do it . . . any day now . . .”
So much for revenge. Poppy scowled, imagining Blake Bursaw laughing his hyena laugh at her. “What’s wrong?”
“Your friend—the one who set this up—”
“Obviously he is not my friend.”
“He is dealing with people he should not be dealing with. He must stay away. You must stay away too. And make sure this sculpture is destroyed!”
“It already has been. But I still don’t know
who made it.”
Madame Grosholtz abandoned her preparations, or reorganization, or whatever it was, and rushed up to Poppy. “You must take one,” she told her, glancing at the figures around the room. Her eyes, desperate, fell on the boy with the yellow sneakers. She picked it up and dragged it across the room. “I’ll lend you one, to protect you. Like a bodyguard. Yes?”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary.”
“Why not?”
Um, because they’re dolls? Poppy wanted to respond. She didn’t want to hurt the woman’s feelings, but this was getting ridiculous. Plus, the thought of having any one of these creepatrons in her possession—even that dashing SexyFace Viking—was enough to make her skin crawl. “I’ll be fine on my own. This is just a childish prank war that got a little out of control—the kid’s a dick, but he’s not dangerous. Besides, these belong in a museum, not—”
“It’s starting . . .” Madame Grosholtz had put the sculpture down and was back to the muttering. “They’ll be starting . . .”
“What is starting?” Poppy squeezed her head between her hands, trying to make sense of what was happening. “What’s going on?”
“I’ll do what I can, but it’s up to you now.” Madame Grosholtz stood up on her tiptoes to retrieve something on a high shelf. “Open your backpack!”
She said it with such authority that Poppy did so immediately. Madame Grosholtz dropped the item into her bag—a hefty pillar candle, about the size of a can of tennis balls. Though the wax of the candle was black, it was encased in a tube of solid white stone.
Poppy struggled to lift the bag and zip it at the same time. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“You must—”
Poppy’s phone rang. She held up a finger to Madame Grosholtz, who gave her the look of annoyance common to all who have been relegated to second place by a cell phone. “Hello?”
The seething could be felt over the airwaves. “Where are you?”
“Oh God, Jill, I’m sorry.” Poppy reflexively started walking toward the door, and Madame Grosholtz followed. “I got a little sidetracked—”