You tried to change the subject, although your groping around for something to say helped me. You had asked me if I’d bought any more coins. I reminded you, and said that I had one I would like you to have. Was I wrong in detecting momentary pound signs in your eyes, like in the cartoons? I wouldn’t have blamed you, Aaron. I don’t suppose your job was a very secure one. You were in a dead end for such a clearly intelligent and attractive lad.
I don’t think I said that out loud.
‘Don’t worry,’ I did say, as I opened a small cabinet and pulled out a tray of coins. ‘It’s a duplicate. I’ve got quite a few, in fact. They are worth a few pounds, but don’t think about a new car just yet!’ I picked up a large silver coin, a crown piece minted for the Silver Jubilee of George V. The reverse depicted the traditional Saint George and the Dragon, but the design was sleekly Art Deco. It was one that I had always revered, with man, horse, and monster seemingly united in a sinuous engagement without sign of an end.
I dropped the heavy coin into your outstretched hand, Patrick, to let you look at it. You gave it back quickly, as I knew you would. It was that coin I later pushed into your mouth, forcing it between your teeth before I capsized the boat and let the river take you away and hide you.
You accepted my gift with real pleasure. I told you not to leave it in your car. ‘I’ll give you a little box for it, Aaron,’ I said. ‘So you can keep it safe.’ You were pleased, Aaron, but did you think a payment was being made? And if so, what for?
As the last light seeped from the sky you stood up. ‘I have to go,’ you said. ‘Thank you for the meal and everything, and the coin. I’ll look after it, I promise.’ I made you, then, the offer of a bed for the night, and said how much I appreciated your company and conversation, but your predicted refusal was most diplomatically done. It was a nice touch. When I said I hoped you’d come again, and you agreed, I think you really did mean it. And when you said that if I ever changed my mind about going out on the river, say on a fine evening or afternoon fairly soon, to let you know and you would be more than happy, and so on. . . . Thank you, Aaron.
***
Now it is fully dark—or as dark as it can ever get in London. Lights drip into the river. Windows slam closed, and footsteps scuff the pavement. Someone drops a glass outside the Strandside Arms. I can as good as hear David swearing.
It will soon be time to go. I am almost emptied out now, as you are fully aware, Patrick. You, me, and the river: held for all these years, attracting like magnets but also as much repelled as when a pole is reversed. It is time for me to try and follow—and I’m no longer concerned at what, if anything, of the ‘actual Me’ comes back. I leave that to you and the river.
I am set to take passage.
Whether on land or water, I will be just something else carried away. But I think I am ahead of you.
Go back home in your car and look at your lucky coins. Spend your life driving around the city and return to me when you are ready. Oh, Aaron, I hope you will not be too long.
Perhaps you might yet join us.
YOU-GO-BACK
Elise Forier Edie
I met the demon because my sister Maddie got a job working for P.T. Barnum as one of his Circassian Beauties over at the American Museum. She washed her hair in beer every day and combed it backwards until it stood on end like a crown of wet feathers. She wore colourful trousers, kept her shoulders bare, sat on a platform behind the whale tank on the second floor, and pulled in more scratch than anyone in our family ever had in their lives.
This was 1864. The country was at war, and at ten years old I was still a little young to be donning a blue wool uniform and fighting for the Union. So that made me sole man in a house of four women, all of us jammed in a fourth floor tenement on the Lower East Side. I know what you’re thinking—tenements in New York, gee whiz—but it wasn’t that bad. Our place was dark, sure, and tiny. It smelled like you’d think, with nothing but an open pit in the back for a privy. But it wasn’t the rat infested misery factory it would be, not yet. It was pretty doggone Jake, and once Maddie got the job at Barnum’s, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time there, anyway.
Maddie was called Zribeda Zoledod and had to memorise a whole history of being a prince’s daughter and one of fifty wives to some sheik in Araby, so she could answer questions and give out autographs to the thousands of dykes and hayseeds who flocked to The American Museum every single day. Even at ten I knew my sister was a looker, with clear skin, fat bouncy breasts and straight white teeth. But Maddie was more than just a pretty face. She could act. Take one look at her bottomless, brown peepers and you’d think she’d been raised on nothing but poetry and peacock stew. She’d whisper, ‘I was chust a leettle girl when he took me to be his voman slave,’ and some poor masher would be eating out of her hand. Geez Louise, the Circassian Beauty. What a crock, I tell you, but Maddie did it up hunky dory.
And say what you like about P.T. Barnum, (and plenty did, believe me) but that American Museum of his was a corker, like nothing you ever saw, and the best twenty-five cents you ever paid for fun. It seemed to have everything in the world inside it—a theatre, a zoo, a freak show, an exhibit hall, waxworks, stuff to make your hair stand on end, stuff to make your eyes goggle. Not all of it was bunk, neither. Maddie might have been a big humbug, but the giants and midgets and albinos were the real deal, as were the clowns and acrobats and animals. You could spend a week just gawking at the pictures Barnum had hung on the walls. He knew it, too. Fact was, old Barnum got so worried about folks spending all day just soaking it up, he regularly gouged them by putting up fancy signs pointing, ‘This way to the Egress’. The poor chumps who followed the arrows shuffled right out the door, because it turns out ‘egress’ is just another word for ‘Ann Street’. Barnum made them pay another twenty-five cents to get in the museum again, too. After all, the exit was clearly marked. That P.T. Barnum. What a piker. Nothing got past that guy. Until the demon You-Go-Back, that is.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Until Maddie got hired, I never had been to the American Museum, but once I got a load of the place, I never wanted to leave. The same afternoon my ma took me to see Maddie, I also gaped at a cage filled with snakes, contemplated an Egyptian mummy, and wondered at a trapeze artist somersaulting through the air in a red body-stocking. I heard a lecture given by a gal who had worked as a Confederate spy, eyed the eight feet tall woman’s juicy oversized bosoms, drank a cold lemonade, ate a candy apple and heard a violin played by a man who weighed forty-five pounds and called himself a Living Skeleton. I finished that off by splitting my sides at the antics of two white whales, cavorting like kids in a tank of ocean water on the second floor, their whale breath blowing out of their backs, smelling like dark caves, mystery fish and brine. Boy howdy, that was the best day of my life; and I figured if Maddie could have a job at the Museum, I’d better get one too. Otherwise I was going to take to crime, just to scrounge the admission every day.
Of course I couldn’t walk on a tightrope or act in a play, nor could I do figures or lecture about the war. But finally I lit on the idea of pestering the fishmongers at the docks to let me deliver the whale and seal food twice a day, and after that it was a simple matter to make myself indispensable to Professor Kohn, who managed the animal exhibits, and Mr Greenwood, who was the boss of everything else. I sat outside their offices for two straight weeks, and every time one of them came to the door there I’d be, Little Bobby Tubbs, hat in my hand, saying, with all the good will and energy a boy can muster, ‘Can I help you, sir?’ Pretty soon they needed me for everything, from posting letters to feeding the bears. Not long after that, Mr Greenwood put me on the payroll and I was in a kind of boy heaven—pennies in my pockets and free run of the Museum whenever I liked. That was a year of skylarks. And when the war ended, the whole world was suddenly a jar of golden beer with the lid just off, hissing, popping, soldiers all home by summertime (my dad was one of them), music ringing through the st
reets, and me a boy with the best job ever.
I called Mr Barnum ‘Chief’, and I know what you’ve heard about him, but he was a good man, even if he regularly stretched the truth to make a buck. You never in your life saw someone who flogged it so hard—like he had a runaway steam engine packed in his head instead of a brain. He never stopped looking for stuff to display, ways to keep the public amused, things that would amaze and disgust by turns. Every week something new would show up at the Museum: a replica of Lincoln’s boyhood cabin, a little girl spotted like a leopard, a couple of angry looking alligators, you name it, Barnum dragged it to the light, chuckling the whole time. More often than not, he would preside over each arrival, a big smile on his face, peering, patting, boasting, his dark hair flopping in his face, giggling like a kid. He called himself the Great Showman but he really was more like a Great Little Boy, tickled blue by each new curiosity.
But right about the time the war ended in 1865, he all of a sudden got political aspirations, campaigning for the Connecticut State Legislature and zipping out of town to make his mark on the government. Why anyone would choose sitting in a meeting hall with a bunch of sweaty men in suits making laws and such, when they could be making a sea lion learn to sit up and talk, I do not know, but off he went. So when the demon You-Go-Back arrived in New York one hot day in August, it was just me and George Miller and Mr Greenwood who saw the thing. I like to think if Mr Barnum had actually been there, had actually laid eyes on the creature, everything would have turned out different. But he wasn’t and he didn’t, and I suppose that has made all the difference.
I want to be clear here: I’d seen some dog ugly stuff in the American Museum. Mr Barnum wanted people in the door and he would do whatever it took to bring them in, whether it meant sewing a fish tail to a stuffed chimpanzee and calling it a mermaid, or buying a couple of feeble-minded children off a Mexican family and give them a new life as the Aztec Wonder Twins. When he told Mr Greenwood he was getting a demon shipped in a silver-lined box from South Carolina, and to please unpack him for immediate display, I figured the Chief was giving his usual line of dressed up manure, and the box would turn out to have nothing more in it than a seasick pangolin or Barbary ape. But when George Miller, the lame, slope-shouldered, ham-fisted galoot who dealt with the new arrivals, popped the lid of the shipping crate for a peek, and Mr Greenwood and I gathered round, we knew right off we were looking at something different.
We were in the basement of the Museum, a crowded cave of a place that stank of animal dung, packed with such a mass of junk, empty cages, crates and papers, there seemed to be no end to it. Up above you could hear the footsteps of a thousand souls walking through the Museum’s front doors, and down the hall you could feel the steam coming off the hippo cage, where those fat, strange creatures roared and sometimes slept underwater, looking for all the world like rocks with a tail.
When George cracked the top of the crate, at first I thought You-Go-Back was sculpture, just a big, bald head, with pointed bat’s ears and a ridiculous beaky nose, painted an angry, ugly red. His eyes were closed, as if in sleep. He smelled faintly of brimstone, and I remember a palpable wave of warmth washing over us, like the crate contained a wad of banked coals.
George said something like, ‘Nothing to see here, gents, just a brick made out to look like a head,’ when blam! the thing’s eyelids suddenly popped open, a pair of huge yellow peepers stared up at us and we all screamed. Glory, it wouldn’t have been any more strange and unexpected than if your favourite armchair suddenly started walking around the room. The black pupils careened left, they zipped right, then the mouth spun to life with this awful, pointy-toothed smile, like a dog’s. The demon unfolded his tiny, spindly body, spidery thin, all long, impossible arms, and sinewy, skeletal legs, and my heart shrivelled in my chest, like a worm in the sun.
You got used to seeing weird things at the American Museum, sure. The Chief specialised in ‘strange’, after all, and whether it was a Feejee Mermaid or a midget wedding, you expected your hair to stand on end now and then. But this creature made my skin shrivel as soon as his yellow crazed gaze slithered in my direction, and when he opened his mouth and started speaking in a voice that sounded like a shovel grating in a coal bin, my heart gave a tremendous thunderclap, my ears started to ring and I fell on the floor in a dead faint.
I woke, covered in sweat, with George crouched over me, his forehead creased.
‘Is it still here?’ I squeaked, sounding for all the world like one of my sisters waking from a nightmare.
George nodded glumly. ‘I put the lid back on the crate,’ he rasped. ‘I couldn’t stand to look at it and that’s the truth.’
I sat up. Mr Greenwood stood nearby, mopping his face with a big handkerchief. A gas lamp flickered, making shadows on his cheekbones. ‘We cannot possibly put that thing on display,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘It would drive every customer from the premises.’ And he added with a strange laugh, ‘What on earth could Phineas have been thinking?’
‘I’m sure Mr Barnum never actually beheld it, sir’ George said. ‘He couldn’t have, and then ask to have it delivered. Could he?’
Mister Greenwood shook his head. ‘I will have to do some investigating. When I heard a demon was arriving, naturally I assumed . . . well, I suppose I never imagined something so . . .’
‘Real?’ I ventured. ‘Something so real, sir?’
Mr Greenwood gave a thin, sickly smile. ‘I never imagined something so . . . upsetting. Leave it crated, George, for the time being, until I can contact Mr Barnum and ask what he really expects of this acquisition.’
There came a muffled, coal-shovel sound from the inside of the crate and we all shuddered. It sounded like the damned thing was laughing.
Next thing I knew I was running down Broadway through the sticky summer air to send a wire to Mr Barnum, asking what he meant to do with You-Go-Back (what kind of name was that for a demon, anyway?) and could he come to New York and ‘behold the monster’ at his earliest convenience? When I got back to the Museum Mr Greenwood sent me out again, this time to get some books from a rabbi named Saul Abramson.
‘Books from a rabbi, Mr Greenwood?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t we contact a priest? The church is right down the street, sir.’
Mr Greenwood grimaced. ‘As a Universalist, Bobby, Mr Barnum has no compunctions about consulting a wide variety of scholars for his pamphlets and exhibits. And Saul is philosophically immune to our more heretical endeavours.’
I nodded, even though I had no idea what he was talking about. In truth, I understood maybe half of what came out of Mr Greenwood’s mouth, but he was a spanking nice man to work for. He gave me a penny and told me to buy a bun while I was out. I didn’t, because the demon had made my stomach flip, but the penny was nice all the same.
The rabbi lived in a fourth floor tenement just around the corner from my own place. He had a long beard and nice brown eyes cosied in a nest of bags and wrinkles. I liked him right away. I explained that Mr Greenwood had sent me for some ‘reference materials’ about demons and he raised one of his bushy eyebrows.
‘Demons?’ he said. ‘I thought the good Mr Barnum would not show anything inauthentic in his museum?’ His eyes twinkled.
‘Well, we don’t know what Mr Barnum was about, sir,’ I said, ‘since he’s up in Connecticut just now. But we think we have an actual devil, see.’ Here the old Jew laughed, so I added, my mouth going a little dry remembering the creature’s yellow eyes. ‘Really, it can’t be anything else except something from Hell, sir, I promise you. And we don’t know which demon he is, or what we should do with him, or if, you know, a silver cage is really enough to keep him bound.’ I shuddered, thinking about the damned thing getting loose; and then I wanted to put my head in a vice just to squish the thought out as soon as it came.
The old man’s brown eyes kindled. ‘An actual demon?’ he said, like the whole thing was a joke.
‘You don’t believe me?’
; ‘I don’t believe in hell, child, and devils are rarer than you think in this day and age.’ He chuckled. ‘Let me fetch my coat and I will see what species of monkey Mr P.T. Barnum has captured now.’
‘I don’t think you’d want to, sir,’ I said quickly, hating the way my voice quavered. The old man raised his bushy eyebrows again but I pressed on. ‘Meaning no insult, sir, but you’re an old man, aren’t you? And my heart about stopped when I saw that thing.’ I felt my skin crawl, remembering the way its jointed legs unfolded, like an insect’s.
‘Well, that sounds too good to pass up,’ said Rabbi Abramson. He plucked some books from the shelves and pressed a heavy, musty stack into my arms. Then he fetched a wooden cane from a corner of the room. ‘Let us make our way north, my good young man. I have seen so many horrors already in my life. In the interests of religion and scientific inquiry, I believe I will let my heart take its chances.’
I am used to moving very quickly up and down Broadway, dodging here and there like a bat on the hunt. But that day I had to go slow to allow Mr Abramson to keep up. I didn’t mind at all. I dragged my feet even more than the old man did. I was in no hurry to get back to the Museum.
But it’s a fact that if you put one foot in front of the other and keep doing it, you’ll always get where you’re going. And sure enough, much sooner than I would have liked, I found myself at the Museum’s back door. George sat on the stoop smoking a pipe and looking as sad as I’ve ever seen him.
‘Did something . . . happen?’ I asked. ‘It . . . didn’t get away, did it?’
He shook his head very slowly and said, sounding for all the world like a man with one foot in the grave, ‘Seeing that thing, it’s like all I can think about now is the war, and Mr Lincoln dying, and losing my baby girl Bess to the flux. It’s like I can’t remember any good thing at all. Can you?’
Strange Tales V Page 10