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The Incredible Talking Machine

Page 3

by Jenni Spangler


  Snell leaned back in his chair and opened his newspaper. ‘And find some better clothes. You can’t present yourself in those.’ For a long minute there was no sound other than the scratch of the pen and the excited chatter inside Tig’s own head. She rocked on her heels and clasped her hands together, itching to leave, but didn’t dare go until Snell dismissed her. He seemed to be completely absorbed in the Manchester Guardian.

  She cleared her throat.

  Snell flicked down the corner of his paper and glared at her. ‘Well? What are you still doing here?’

  Dress Rehearsal

  Tig bobbed a little curtsey and made a run for it. As she pulled open the office door, Nelson and Gus leaped back from it. They had both been listening.

  ‘Ha!’ Gus smirked as soon as the door fell closed behind her. ‘You’ve got stuck with the mad professor. Serves you right.’

  ‘Go stick your head in the privies, Gus.’ Tig turned right and headed back through to the Minshull Gallery. Nelson walked beside her, and Gus followed along behind.

  ‘I had to carry all his luggage in. Right moaning so-and-so, he was,’ said Gus. ‘So precious about his stupid machine.’ He put on a bad impression of the professor’s accent. ‘Vatch out! Shtop! You vill hurt her!’

  ‘He doesn’t sound like that,’ said Tig.

  ‘Can’t wait to see what he does when you get in trouble. Which you will – you always do. Because you’re useless.’ Gus sniggered.

  At the far end of the gallery, behind the stuffed bear on its hind legs, she pulled open the door to the workshop. It creaked, because of course Gus still hadn’t oiled the hinges. She held it open for Nelson, then let it slam in Gus’s face.

  She turned to Nelson with a grin.

  ‘I’ve got brilliant news! I’m going to be the professor’s assistant!’ She grabbed Nelson’s wrist and darted across the workshop. ‘Come on!’

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Nelson.

  ‘The wardrobe.’ Tig took the stairs two at a time. ‘I need to find something to wear. Help me look!’

  The wardrobe was at the end of a row of dressing rooms. In it were stored various bits and pieces of costumes left from twenty years or more of plays at the Royale, folded into boxes and hanging from rails.

  It also happened to be Tig’s bedroom. She slept behind a rack of men’s suits, her thin straw mattress topped with an old fur coat and her pillowcase stuffed with some worn-out petticoats. It wasn’t much, but it was cosy and private. Much better than the shared rooms in the old boarding house she’d stayed at for a while with her mother. And better than sleeping on the floor in Snell and Eliza’s apartment, as she had done when she first arrived. It was nice to be near the warm kitchen stove, but Snell snored loudly enough to wake the dead, and always woke in the foulest of tempers. Up in the wardrobe she was about as far away from Snell as she could get, so it suited her just fine.

  Snell hadn’t wanted Tig to live at the theatre at all. It wasn’t normal practice for a stagehand to live on site. Mother had sent Tig to the interview clutching a letter addressed to Mrs Eliza Lincoln, and told Tig not to read it, though of course she had opened it straight away. It said that Mother was leaving the city for work and asked Eliza to hire Tig, look out for her and let her sleep at the theatre, so she wasn’t left in the boarding house alone. It had ended with ‘please, do this for Antigone’, which Tig always thought strange, because her mother never called her Antigone. Only her dad had ever used her full name.

  Tig started rummaging through the racks for a suitable outfit.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ said Nelson, opening a box labelled ‘bonnets’ and peering inside.

  ‘Anything smart.’ She pulled out a black dress but the collar was ripped and it was missing two buttons.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Nelson.

  ‘I don’t have time to mend it before tomorrow.’ She shoved it back into place.

  ‘How about this?’ Nelson held up a dress with a huge skirt covered in frills and ribbons. ‘Imagine Snell’s face if he saw you scrubbing the steps in that!’

  ‘I can hear him already! “Miss Rabbit, you forget your place!” ’ She pulled out a dark blue gown and held it up to her shoulders. It trailed onto the floor.

  ‘No good,’ said Nelson. ‘You’ll break your neck trying to climb the ladders in that.’

  ‘It’s all too big.’ She flung the dress over a bench and slumped down next to it, dejected. ‘Nothing in here is going to fit me unless I grow overnight.’

  ‘Maybe you can just cover up the dress you’ve got now, with a shawl or something.’ He hopped up onto the other end of the bench, reaching up for some dusty boxes on the top shelf. ‘There might be something in here.’

  A cold draught swept through the room, rising up from Tig’s toes, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She looked behind her.

  Cold Annie was standing in the doorway.

  ‘Nelson?’ said Tig, softly, as though Annie were a bird that might be scared away by a loud noise.

  ‘One minute, I’m sure there was a box…’

  ‘Nelson, look.’ She tapped his leg and pointed.

  He glanced over his shoulder and made a whimpering noise, grabbing the edge of the shelf to keep his balance.

  ‘You see her, right?’ whispered Tig.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Nelson answered through closed lips, completely still as though a wasp had landed on him and he was scared of being stung.

  The ghost made a beckoning gesture, before turning and walking down the corridor and out of sight.

  ‘We should follow her,’ said Tig, sounding braver than she felt.

  ‘That seems like a really bad idea,’ said Nelson.

  Tig was already on her feet. ‘Come on. She wants to help us.’ Tig instinctively knew this was true. In two years at the Royale, she’d barely glimpsed a flicker of Annie, and now she had appeared right in front of her twice in one day. It would be stupid not to follow her and find out why.

  ‘Tig, she’s… it’s a ghost!’

  ‘Don’t you want to know why she’s suddenly showing herself?’

  ‘Not really!’ But he got down from the bench and followed close behind her as she moved out onto the corridor. They moved quietly and slowly, so as not to break the spell. The corridor was gloomy, small puddles of weak daylight spilling through the open dressing-room doors.

  ‘Tig, what if she’s dangerous?’ said Nelson. ‘We can’t trust a ghost!’

  ‘But you trust me, right?’ said Tig.

  Annie entered the room nearest the stairs, the one people said had been hers. Performers avoided it whenever they could. Those that did use it often complained of things being lost or make-up moved around.

  The children followed her inside. Tig could hear the blood rushing behind her ears with every heartbeat, and she was glad that Nelson was close by. Annie crossed to the far corner, where a tall cupboard was set into the wall. It hadn’t been used for a long time, so long that it was stuck shut with several layers of paint that had been applied over the years. Annie gestured towards it.

  ‘What?’ said Tig. ‘What do you want?’

  Annie nodded towards the cupboard.

  ‘Should I open it?’ Tig whispered to Nelson.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But you’re going to.’

  Tig edged across the room, shivering as she grew closer to the spirit, and pulled at the handle. It didn’t open, but she felt it give slightly, and some of the paint flaked off onto the floor.

  She glanced back at Annie, who stood watching, and Nelson, who clung to the doorframe with his eyes firmly on the ghost. Tig put both hands on the cupboard handle and yanked with all her strength. It resisted for a moment and then swung fully open. A bundle of clothes, stuffed inside who knew how many years earlier, toppled out and slumped into a pile at Tig’s feet.

  ‘More clothes!’ Tig laughed. ‘Are you helping me find something to wear?’ Perhaps she felt bad about almost making Tig fall earlier,
and was trying to make up for it.

  ‘She’s gone,’ said Nelson, and he was right. ‘She just… stopped being there. Oh, I don’t like this at all.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Tig. ‘Look! I told you she wanted to help.’

  She grabbed the top garment and shook it out. It was a woollen overdress in a bright, warm red. Not too fancy. Not too long or heavy. Tig stuck her arms in the sleeves and wrapped it round her. It tied with a belt around the waist.

  ‘Nelson, what do you think?’

  ‘Perfect,’ he said, though his eyes were darting from corner to corner as though Annie might sneak up on him.

  ‘Thank you, Annie,’ she said to the empty air.

  It was almost an exact fit, and much smarter than her usual brown dress. The sleeves were a bit long, but that wasn’t a problem as she preferred to roll them up for working anyway. The old cloudy mirror in the corner reflected a confident, put-together professor’s assistant. She smoothed down the material. There were a few creases, and a slightly musty smell, but that was to be expected.

  ‘And it has pockets!’ Tig always had a hundred things to carry around – tools and chalk and string and a tinder box, ready for whatever job she might need to do next. She slipped her hands inside to see how big they were.

  There was something inside the right one. Something round, cool and smooth to the touch, like a new marble. She drew it out and held it up to the light. It was white, with a nutmeg brown ring and a black spot. It wasn’t a marble.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Nelson.

  ‘It’s an eye.’ Her heart gave an almighty thud at the realization. A one-eyed ghost had given her a coat with a glass eye in the pocket. ‘It has to belong to Cold Annie, right?’

  ‘Has to,’ said Nelson, coming in for a closer look. Tig handed it to him. ‘But why would she give it to you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Tig was so full of sparks it was impossible to be still. She jumped up and down on the spot, squeezing her hands into tight fists. ‘No – I do know! It’s for the machine! I can fix the machine!’

  Nelson stared at the eye and frowned. ‘That’s so strange. It’s exactly the same colour as your eyes. The dark ring and everything.’

  ‘This is how I’ll make a good impression on the professor! I broke the eye on the talking machine but Annie gave me this one so I can fix it!’

  ‘Perhaps you should just give the glass eye to the professor, and let him decide what to do with it,’ said Nelson.

  ‘No, I have to do it myself! I broke it, I should fix it.’ Her whole body tingled with the bright blue excitement that accompanied her very best ideas. ‘I’ll do it tonight.’

  ‘But Gus said the professor doesn’t like people touching the machine.’

  ‘That’s why I’ll do it when he’s asleep. When he wakes up it’ll already be fixed! It will prove to him that I’m clever and capable.’ She took back the glass eye and rolled it around in her hand.

  ‘Tig?’

  ‘And then he’ll trust me and—’

  ‘Tig! You’re going to get yourself into more trouble.’

  She felt a little twinge of doubt in her plan. Nelson was the sensible one, and he was usually right. But she had such a good feeling about this. It had to be what Annie wanted her to do. ‘I won’t. Not this time, I’m sure of it!’

  ‘You always say that.’

  Before she could answer, the faint sound of bells from St Anne’s rang out. ‘Oh! It’s nearly showtime!’

  Curtain Up

  It was finally time for the night’s performance to begin. Tig mingled with the audience as they made their way to their seats. Nelson and Gus had got the stage ready earlier that day.

  She headed up to the dress circle – the upper level of the audience. These were the cheap seats, rows of wooden benches for the poorer customers. Below them were comfortable upholstered chairs for people who could pay a little more, and on each side were private boxes for people who didn’t like mixing with the riff-raff. The boxes were empty today, just as they had been for months. It had been a long time since anyone of importance had come to the Royale.

  Times were hard at the theatre. Plays and operas were expensive: there were fees for the actors, singers and dancers; costumes to be made; musicians to be hired; sets to be built and painted. A handful of music halls had sprung up around Manchester and lots of people were going there instead, for songs and cheap beer. That meant less money for the Royale, and if you couldn’t afford to hire the very best performers, then the most expensive seats stayed empty. Tig loved the Royale and wanted to help, but any time she had a good idea to bring in customers, she was told by Snell to ‘remember her place’.

  She patted her pocket, checking for the thousandth time that the glass eye was still there. The audience members were laughing and talking as they found their seats, a delicious hum of excitement moving through the rows, and shuffled and ‘excuse-me’d’ her way to her favourite spot, right at the front of the balcony, on the far left.

  Tig peered over the railings.

  Snell was there, almost directly below her. This was out of character for him, as he never bothered to watch the plays. He didn’t care whether the troupes he hired were any good. It was a miracle he’d hired the professor, something new and unusual.

  He was in intense conversation with a red-haired man in a brown suit. Tig was fairly sure it was Mr Albion, who owned the mill directly behind the Royale. She walked past him sometimes when she was out on errands. He liked to stand at the doors and berate his employees for not moving fast enough when they came to start their shift. Tig was so grateful that she worked here in the relative safety and comfort of the theatre, and not in that horrible man’s awful factory.

  Tig glanced nervously around the dress circle. It was less than half full, which was not good for opening night. And where was Nelson?

  A hush fell over the waiting crowd as the heavy red curtains began to rise. Tig leaned forward over the railings. Gradually the legs of the machine came into view. Professor Faber walked onto the stage from the shadowy wings.

  The machine had been dressed for the occasion – fabric was wrapped and pinned beneath the face to look like a dress. The professor, on the other hand, had not changed his suit for the show and it looked crumpled and dusty, hanging limply off his shoulders as if made for a much bigger man. Squinting at the bright footlights, he took an awkward bow and the audience offered a polite smattering of applause.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said the professor. He cleared his throat and tried again, a little louder. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I present Euphonia, the incredible talking machine.’

  He swept one arm back towards the machine. Tig cringed a little at his stilted and uncomfortable delivery.

  The acoustics in the theatre were good, but Tig was straining forward in her seat to make out his mumbled words. ‘By operating a series of levers and keys, I can reproduce…’ He coughed. ‘I can, uh… reproduce… the nineteen sounds from which all spoken words are constructed.’

  ‘He’s not very good, is he?’ Nelson said, suddenly appearing beside her. ‘Sorry I’m late. Snell almost caught me sneaking in.’

  ‘Why is Faber on a shipwreck?’ Tig whispered back. The flats – wooden panels that stuck out from the edge of the stage – were painted to look like the broken hull of a ship with ropes and portholes. The backdrop cloth was a beach with tropical trees and jagged, seaweed-covered rocks.

  ‘The professor said he didn’t care which scenery we used, he just wanted to be left alone. So Snell said to use what was already up.’

  That was typical of Snell. He loved to talk about what a great manager he was, but he didn’t really care about the theatre. The poor professor looked ridiculous standing in front of the mismatched set. From up here, she could probably spit right into Snell’s hair. It was tempting, but she shouldn’t…

  ‘D’you reckon it’s real, this machine, or is it just a trick?’ said Nelson.

  The audien
ce were starting to whisper amongst themselves, impatient. Faber tugged on his collar and for five excruciating seconds he stood wide-eyed at the front of the stage with a look of mild panic. It seemed he had forgotten his words.

  ‘Can’t be a trick.’ Tig shuffled along the bench to make room for Nelson. ‘He hasn’t got the showmanship to fool people.’

  When it came down to it, most theatre was simply lying with style. Actors asked their audiences to forget, at least for a couple of hours, that they were sitting in a dark room in the middle of the city, and believe instead that they were in the countryside, or a royal palace, or on a storm-drenched island. Everyone knew this, and everyone was willing to play along, that was the fun of it. But to trick people, to actually make them believe their eyes when they saw the impossible, you had to gain their trust. Dazzle them, make them laugh, show a bit of confidence and swagger. Professor Faber, still frozen in the lamplight, didn’t seem capable of that.

  ‘Get on with it!’ a man yelled from the stalls and there was a ripple of laughter.

  Faber made a brief bow and retreated behind his machine. He sat on a stool like a pianist, and placed his fingers on the keys.

  Something between a groan and a sigh came from the machine. Then the lips parted and it began to speak.

  ‘It is a pleasure to meet you.’ The words were slow, heavy and deep. They sounded inhuman, strange. The audience let out a collective shudder. A young man on the bench nearest Tig leaned back, disgusted.

  Tig and Nelson gasped.

  ‘Human speech is produced by several organs of the body.’ Euphonia took a long time to pronounce each word, like a music box that was winding down. It spoke with the same Germanic accent as its creator.

  The machine was really talking. It should be impossible, to make a voice come from a solid object with no brain. It’s like magic, thought Tig. No, better than magic. It was the most incredible thing she had ever witnessed, and she’d already encountered Cold Annie twice that day.

  ‘Ugh,’ said Nelson, a little too loud. ‘Spooky.’

 

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