‘Mostly I just feel like I’ll never sleep or eat again.’
George nodded slowly. ‘Well, you’re young,’ he said, as if that made any sense at all.
I turned to Rabbi Abramson. ‘Sir, I am going to take George up to see the whales if you don’t mind. Whales are wonderful medicine when you’re sad.’ George’s downturned mouth lifted in a small smile. ‘While I’m up there I will hunt down Mr Greenwood and tell him you’ve come. I don’t recommend you try to look at the demon, though he’s just down the hall in the basement. It’s . . . well, no one should see that thing while they are alone. I mean it.’
Again, I moved slower than I ordinarily would, for George made his way upstairs, walking bent over, like an old man, dragging his lame leg. We could hear the whales splashing before we even made it to their tank. They were wonderful things, those Labrador whales. Like fish, only also like children. Even with their tails and fins and strange white skin, they reminded me more than anything of my littlest sister, Jenny, her who died and loved me best while she lived. I parked old George right up against the tank, fetched him a bucket of fish-heads he could toss in the drink, and then I hunted down Mr Greenwood.
I found him in Mr Barnum’s office, puzzling over a telegram that must have been delivered while I was off fetching the rabbi. ‘He orders us not to move the thing.’ Mr Greenwood’s eyes were large and dark in his pale face. ‘He wants to see it. He’s most insistent,’ he said, adding, ‘and Phineas isn’t coming back to New York for weeks, Bobby.’
I goggled. ‘We have to keep the thing, here at the Museum, sir, for weeks? Glory, what do we feed it? And what if . . . what if it escapes?’
He flapped his hand as if to shoo away the thought. ‘Did you get some books from the rabbi?’
‘Yes, and the rabbi came himself,’ I said. I added, ‘He don’t believe in demons, sir. Did you know that?’
‘Well, I didn’t either, Bobby, until today.’ He gestured that we should make our way downstairs, so the two of us went, passing George, who still wistfully watched the whales cavort, but like a man looking at something beautiful from a long way off.
We found the rabbi slumped next to the crate, his whiskery chin resting on his cane, his eyes staring in the distance. The books he had brought were strewn higgly-piggly, as if he had been opening them up one by one and then throwing them around like birdseed. My throat closed up tight when I saw the look on his face.
‘You saw it?’ I asked.
The rabbi shook his head. ‘No. No,’ he said. And then, as if trying to convince himself, he added, ‘No,’ again. ‘But it spoke to me, from that box it resides in. And I recognised its voice.’
‘You’ve heard it before?’
‘You know its language?’
The rabbi waved his hand at us both. ‘It spoke to me in Hebrew. It called me by my name. ‘ He started to cry, real quiet, but tears poured down his face in a flood. His voice remained steady as he went on. ‘It is here to teach a lesson, as are all such things God made. But it’s one I already knew and did not want to learn again. I truly did not. You were right my boy, I had no business coming here. And you would be wise to leave this place as soon as you can.’
‘What can something like that teach us?’ I wondered.
The rabbi turned his gaze to Mr Greenwood. ‘The demon is named Ukobach,’ he said. ‘It is a servant of Baal Zevuv, the Lord of Flies. How it has been captured, I cannot say. But to keep a demon caged is stupidity, and to keep it near, an unthinkable risk. Ukobach does not belong in Mr Barnum’s menagerie of living curiosities. It is neither living, as we know it, nor is it a curiosity. It is corporeal misery and doubt. Send it away without delay.’ He rose with difficulty, leaning heavily on his cane. ‘I am going home. I have been brought low today by my pride.’
Mr Greenwood held up a hand. ‘If you would tarry but a moment,’ he said gently. ‘I have a few questions to ask you, Rabbi. Would it be all right if Bobby took some of these reference books upstairs to my office while we speak?’
The rabbi’s gaze slid in my direction. He nodded. ‘I will serve as I can,’ he said softly. ‘But hurry, please. I don’t want to linger near it.’
They watched in silence as I collected the tomes in a small, teetering stack. I hauled them up the stairs. I could hear them talking in low tones behind me as soon as I turned my back.
A little while later, when I stumped back downstairs to see if I was needed for any other errands, I found Mister Greenwood alone, staring into space, his tie askew and his hair, usually oiled and neatly combed, standing up on end like my sister Maddie’s when she was playing Zribeda Zoledod.
I said, ‘We’re getting rid of it, aren’t we, sir? We’re taking the rabbi’s advice?’
Mr Greenwood was a handsome man with a big beard and a strong-looking face. He had worked for Mr Barnum for years, starting as a performer, but finding his true place as the great man’s right hand. I’d never seen him look so weary. He said ‘I have told Phineas more than once, when he gets a hare-brained idea, “This is just going too far.” But he hasn’t listened to me, ever, and thus far he’s always been right. Always. When it comes to the public’s thirst for the absurd, for the grotesque, he has shown again and again, there is no “too far”. There has never been a “too far”. Why should he believe me now? Why should he take my word that this creature really is the limit?’
‘Because it is, sir.’
Mr Greenwood shrugged. ‘I believe I will go to Connecticut by train tonight and speak to Phineas in person. Perhaps then I can convince him of the danger we are in.’ He laughed shortly. ‘You want to know something very curious? The rabbi tells me this demon is nothing special, Bobby. “A very minor entity in the pantheon”, he said. A little firebug, a fry cook. And yet,’ here he shivered, ‘it is as if I have feared nothing before, not even the war, not even death itself.’
I gulped. ‘There’s worse things, worse devils than that You-Go-Back?’ How could something be worse than that monster with his horrible yellow eyes and red skin?
‘He’s nothing but an errand boy, Bobby. Not even a proper Hell Prince. More of a servant, I suppose.’
I felt a little quake in my belly. ‘You’re going to throw that crate in the East River, Mr Greenwood; you have to, no matter what Mr Barnum wants.’
Mr Greenwood sighed. ‘Go home, Bobby. This really isn’t your concern.’
I stopped by the whale tank before I left, to see if George was still there, but he must have packed it in, because the hall was empty. I found my sister climbing off her platform instead, running a hand through her bush of stiffened hair and wiping the paint off her mouth with a white hanky. She offered to buy me dinner before I went home. I told her I wasn’t hungry, and I trudged back to the Lower East Side. I climbed the stairs to our place and went straight to bed, curling in my corner and putting my dad’s coat over my head, even though it was hot as blazes, the air thick enough to cut with a knife.
I thought I’d never sleep again, mind you, but I must have, because the next thing I knew, I was walking in a dream. At first I thought I was back at the Museum, because I stood in an exhibit hall, with glass cases and platforms and signs and whatnot, the echoing sounds of footsteps and voices making a kind of murmuring song all around. The nearby exhibits looked like the waxworks Mr Barnum tricked up, soldiers dressed in jackets from long ago wars and ladies in dresses that left their shoulders bare. But once I had read the exhibit signs, I realised I wasn’t in the American Museum at all, but some other place. One sign, set smartly at the side of a sharp looking diorama, said ‘London, England, 1666’, still another, ‘Nero’s Rome’.
I found my eye drawn to the waxworks which shimmered the way things will in the middle of summer, when the air seems to wiggle because of the heat. Their faces shifted, looking agonised in one blink, and then crazed with happiness in another. The scene seemed to mean different things from minute to minute. A man in a short white robe, with a skirt and a plumed helmet seemed
first to be running in fear, only half dressed, with his thing hanging out, while a woman ran ahead; then it looked like he was laughing, and chasing her, and she was falling to the ground; then it seemed they were fighting, and she was getting ready to grab a rock and throw it in his face. My head started turning like a carousel, and I looked at the floor so I wouldn’t get dizzy.
But the floor was worse, because down there, right by my feet and standing no higher than my knees, was You-Go-Back, red as a cooked crab and grinning his mad, angry grin. My stomach shrank into a fist-sized rock.
The monster opened his mouth and the coal-shovel voice grated. This time, I understood what he said. ‘Do you like my museum, Bobby Tubbs? Does it please you?’
I tried to speak but nothing would come out. My throat had closed on my voice like a butcher’s fist around a goose-neck.
Old You-Go-Back went right on. ‘So much good can come from a fire. Burn the pride out of the self-righteous. Burn the crime out of the criminals. Burn the whole damn place to the ground, eh Bobby? It’s hard not to, don’t you think? Hard not to burn it all.’
I could feel my skin start to singe and crisp while he talked, I could feel a fire inside me, trying to bust out. Finally my throat opened, but I said nothing. Instead I screamed, and then I woke in my corner, with three sisters hovering around, varying expressions of horror and disgust plain on their white faces, for I had been sick in the night and cried in my sleep and I burned in my bed with the worst fever I’d ever known.
I don’t remember much after that. I know they peeled me from my clothes and doused me with water to bring the fever down. I know I wailed about devils to my mother and my sister and the doctor and anyone else who would listen, wailed and implored them to let me talk to Mr Barnum. I begged my sister Maddie not to go to work, that there was fire on the way, that she must stay with me, or she’d die and how could I lose her too after Jenny? Then they dosed me with laudanum, and I slept. And when, days later, I came to myself, weak and starving, my whole world had changed, for the Museum was gone, wiped from the world as surely as a hand wipes away steam from a glass window.
The fire is a matter of public record, of course, and you can look it up yourself in The New York Times: How the whole building seemed to mysteriously go up at once and the flames spread with astonishing rapidity, eating up the building and many others besides, in the space of just a few hours. How most of the people inside escaped with their lives, but few of the animals did. The monkeys screamed in terror, the alligator remained stoic, even as he cooked, and my poor whales boiled in their pool, then blistered and melted, whistling pathetically while scores of little boys laughed at the sight. There’s descriptions of the waxworks dissolving into puddles, countless treasures lost in smoke, a dribble of snakes oozing down the flaming steps, the freaks of nature, once safely availed of the egress, taking refuge in a nearby apartment so they would not be gawked at by the hoards of people who had avidly gathered to witness the conflagration, the building devoured from inside out.
I was not there to see the Museum demolished. It was Maddie who told me, fresh from her own escape, her fair skin still black with smoke, her eyes red from crying and coughing. She told me it was the most horrible thing she had ever seen in her life and the worst of it was how all of New York watched the spectacle like it was one more delight Mr Barnum had cooked up for their pleasure: a fire, the deaths of innocents, the destruction of six floors of national treasures, the like of which would never be seen again.
Maddie wept. ‘No one’s sure how the fire started, Bobby. No one at all. How did you know about it? How did you know the Museum would burn? Was it Confederates? Abolitionists? Who told you?’
I said I didn’t know. I had a nightmare, was all. But I had not a single doubt in my mind where that fire had come from. And the thought of You-Go-Back running loose in the streets of New York made me crazy with fear.
It wasn’t until months later I learned the whole story, from George Miller, who bought me a chocolate and sat on the stoop to eat it with me. By then it was getting on autumn, and my dad had made me apprentice for a watchmaker, and all of my skylarking days at the Museum were done for good.
George had gotten thinner since I saw him last; he had a fresh pink scar on his face and most of his hair had fallen away. He looked twenty years older than he had just half a year before. He said he had trouble sleeping and finding work, and he was thinking he would move upstate to his brother’s farm because the city held no lures for him anymore.
‘I’m old now,’ he said sadly. ‘I got old, Bobby.’
I asked him about the fire, although I was scared to, and he answered me readily enough, although he kept his eyes unfocused, like he was afraid to really look at things while he talked, afraid maybe they might turn into something nasty if he did.
George said he had woken that day, fearful of what lay in the basement. But he went to work anyway—he knew he had to go. Upon arriving, he immediately went to make sure the demon had not broken out of its crate.
‘I seen things in the war,’ George said, massaging his lame leg, the way he always did, when he spoke of the war. ‘And I done things, Bobby, that I wouldn’t have credited myself with. War does that, doesn’t it? Makes men do things they would have never thought. And so I knew what scared was, didn’t I? And I knew what cruel was, too.’ He sighed. ‘But when I come down to the basement that morning, and you know how it stank there, of the hippos and whatnot, and in the summer it was worse?’
I nodded. There was whole parts of the museum would about singe your nostril hairs they smelled so bad, especially in summer, but the basement took the prize.
‘Well,’ George goes on. ‘There was a new smell, over the top of the rest of the stink, and it was that doggone thing, that You-Go-Back. It smelled like smoke and it smelled like coals and it smelled like hell and it was everywhere, Bobby. It was all over everything. And I got scared it’d gotten out, I got scared the damned thing was running around the Museum, and I went to the crate to check, you know?’ I nodded. ‘And I opened the crate, and Jesus Please-us, it hopped in my face,’ here his expression crumpled in disgust, ‘bounced off my noggin and blam! exploded everything around it. Just like that.’ He wiped at his balding head. ‘It was me let it loose,’ he whispered. ‘It was me burned the Museum, Bobby.’
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No, George. Mr Barnum had no business putting it on display. And Mr Greenwood tried to tell him. And the demon gave him a chance, pure and simple, to set him free, but Mr Barnum didn’t listen.’
I chewed my chocolate. It tasted bitter and sweet and good. I broke a piece off for George and he put it in his mouth and sucked on it while he fiddled with his pipe.
After a while I said, ‘What I want to know, is how Mr Barnum found it in the first place. Because that thing, George, that thing was from somewhere Else, wasn’t it? Somewhere Else, not here. Hell, or wherever. Because it wasn’t like anything . . . here. Nothing I’ve ever seen, anyway.’
George sucked on his pipe. The smoke smelled sharp and fine. He puffed for a long time and then he said quietly, ‘He was from here. He was from this world, Bobby.’
I indicated the street with my hand—the dirty paving stones, puddles of pee, the scudding clouds above. A seagull yelled nearby and a little wind blew some fresh air from the river. I thought of my sister Maddie’s lovely face, and wee Jenny’s smile, and the white whales spitting fish breath out of their backs. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, George. Nothing I know, no one I know, comes from the same world as You-Go-Back.’
George smiled a sad smile. ‘Well. You’re young,’ he said at last. ‘You’re young, Bobby.’
‘Why does everyone keep saying that?’ I said. ‘I’m almost twelve!’
George patted my hand. ‘Be happy it’s so. You’re young and you don’t know about how people’s cruel. You don’t know how unnatural things really are.’ He nodded, seeming to speak almost to himself. ‘And I pray you don’t fight in no war, or drink no
gin, or gamble away your life and find out anything more about it, Bobby. How unnatural peoples are, and how unnatural the world is, and how unnatural you are, deep down.’ He blew out a stream of fragrant smoke, and I was both reminded of the whales, and of the fires of hell and I shivered. ‘Eat your chocolate, kid,’ George said.
I ate it to make him happy. But I didn’t want it anymore.
I never did see him again after that, nor Mr Greenwood. I heard how Mr Barnum flopped as a politician, and couldn’t make a go of the museum business ever again, because fires kept dogging him. Eventually he went in for circuses, and then kept his show always travelling, crossing the whole country over and again, sometimes I think so he could outrun any devils that might come behind.
My sister Maddie got married to a nice blowhard, and they made a pack of ankle biters, all who call me ‘Uncle’, even thought they’re scared of me. I have a shop of my own now and I like it fine. A watchmaker’s work is predictable and steady, no whales or hippos to be seen, just cogs and gears and bits and pieces that fit just so, each in its proper place. I’m grateful my dad found me something that doesn’t need any fires or freaks, though I think of the Museum sometimes and the skylarks and get wistful. But not for long. Never for long.
The thing is, I try to stay away from being curious about things now. I suppose I’m like a lot of people when they get older. You can try to show me something startling, but mostly I don’t want to look. You can say you’ve got a surprise in a box, but I’ve seen too much already. I don’t want to know anything new, not really. The more I look, the more I don’t want to see.
I ran into Rabbi Abramson not long ago. He is very old now, bent and stooped. He came into my shop with a silver watch on a chain. His hands shook as he placed it on the counter. His brown eyes leaked moisture, but they were as kind and smart as ever. Until he recognised me, that is. Then he drew back, like he’d seen a ghost, or maybe a demon.
‘The boy who brought me to Ukobach,’ he whispered. ‘The boy all grown and a watchmaker.’
Strange Tales V Page 11