Curious Toys

by Elizabeth Hand

  The door cracked open. One pale blue eye stared out at her from a sunburned sliver of a face.

  “It’s Pin,” she said.

  The door closed and she heard rustling. For an endless moment she thought he wouldn’t return. Then the door opened just enough for her to step inside, a hand waving at her frantically.

  “Get in.”

  She entered cautiously. Henry poked his head out into the hall, closed the door, and locked it.

  What was he so worked up about? When she looked around, she saw nothing but a small room as plain as the hallway. A bed covered with a brown blanket; a deal desk, chair, and night table; a single closet. The only window faced an air shaft. Above the bed, yet another crucifix.

  “Why are you here?”

  She turned to see Henry watching her from the corner of his eye, like a cornered dog.

  “I need you to help me.”

  “You ran away. Why did you run away?”

  “From the barn? I was scared.”

  “Why were you scared? You missed the initiation! There were many Gemini there. General Jack Evans came! Willhie’s sister was so alarmed. That you ran off. It gave her a start. Her heart.” He looked accusingly at Pin, then said in a softer tone, “I said I was sorry. The secret note—did you find it?”

  She nodded, set down the paper bag, dug through her pockets for the crumpled flyer, and handed it to Henry. “There’s a reward for whoever finds the killer. A thousand dollars.”

  “I already knew that.”

  “Well, I know who it is. I have a plan to capture him.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No, I’m not.” She took out the photograph of the doll. “Here’s proof. Be careful!”

  Henry took the photo, frowning. “What is this?”

  “It’s a doll. She’s wearing the dead girl’s clothes. Maria Walewski, the girl who went into Hell Gate.”

  Henry scrutinized the photo for a long time. “You’re right,” he said slowly. “It is a doll.”

  “It’s also her clothes.”

  He continued to gaze at the picture, finally nodded. “The yellow dress. She was the one with the yellow dress. Can I…have this?”

  “No, damn it! Give it to me!”

  He returned the photo without an argument. “What is your plan?” he asked.

  She sank onto the bed. “I need you to meet me at Riverview tonight. Say, eight o’clock. You and Willhie, too.” She hadn’t wanted to bring someone else into it. But now, seeing Henry…she’d forgotten how small he was. Willhie was tall. Even if he wasn’t strong, he looked like he was.

  “Willhie can’t come. He’s the night watchman.”

  Pin felt like crying. “It’ll have to just be us, then.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  She stared at the dark air-shaft window. “I’m still figuring it out.”

  What if Henry betrayed her? He could go to Willhie, or the police, or someone else—General Jack Evans, if he was real and not another of Henry’s wild stories—and claim the reward himself.

  But she couldn’t do it on her own. She had no friends, no one she could trust but a crazy person who used to live in an asylum and believed in something called the Black Sack of Destiny. She wondered dully what would happen if she threw herself down the air shaft.

  “Pin tuck. Pinwheel. Pin knife.”

  She glanced up. “What?”

  “I’ll come,” he said, and quickly looked away.

  It was settled, then. She plucked at the brown blanket, then noticed a sheet of paper on the desk. She leaned over to pick it up.

  It was a drawing of an animal—not a real animal, something as fabulous and strange as the painted creatures on Riverview’s carousel. This one had a dragon’s scaled body and a snake’s tail, antlers like a moose, and huge fantastically decorated wings, a cross between a butterfly and a Japanese fan. Its head was turned so she saw only one sky-blue eye, and its teeth were bared, though not in a threatening way. More like it was smiling. A smaller figure sat in the corner of the page, a girl whose hair and body were all painted the same shade of mustard yellow. She too had a curved scaly tail and batlike wings—blue, yellow, and red, like a flag.

  Pin felt something, something entirely unfamiliar, rise in her. She was so captivated by the drawing that she forgot Henry was there until she heard him clear his throat. She looked up, afraid that he might fly into one of his rages, but he said nothing.

  “Did you draw this?” At his nod she whistled, impressed. “It’s really good. What are they?”

  “Blengins. They protect the children. It’s part of my book.”

  “You’re writing a book?”

  He opened the desk drawer and pulled out what at first looked like a soiled butcher’s parcel. Instead, it was a bulky, misshapen manuscript tied with string. He set it down, untied the string, and pointed at the title page:

  THE ADVENTURES OF GENERAL HENRICO DARGERO,

  OF THE GEMINI AND THE BLACK BROTHERS,

  AND OF THE GIRLS ARMY THAT FOUGHT BESIDE THEM

  IN THEIR BATTLE AGAINST THE CONFEDERACY OF THE CLAN OF THE AGIVECENNIANS

  By Henry Joseph Darger

  The author of this exciting story

  She turned a few pages. The manuscript was entirely handwritten, not typed like Lionel’s scenarios and photoplays. There were lots of crossed-out words and splotches of spilled ink. “What’s it about?”

  “It’s an adventure story. Very thrilling. You can read it if you want.” He pointed at the chair.

  “Maybe another time,” said Pin. “It looks pretty long.”

  “I’m going to be very famous. When the editors see it.”

  He rummaged in the desk drawer and pulled out several large sheets of butcher paper. Each was filled with brightly colored figures—girls, mostly, but also men in gold-and-purple military uniforms, and many, many flowers. Some of the girls wore dresses, purple, yellow, red, but others were naked, with very white skin and black or yellow hair. Many seemed to belong to the same family—their faces matched, their dresses and shoes matched, even their hair. The girls always seemed to be running: from giant flowers that had legs, from a tornado, from a sofa falling from the sky. But mostly they ran from the men in uniform.

  Strangest of all, some of the girls weren’t girls, but boys dressed as girls, or girls with boys’ bodies, ram’s horns, and rainbow wings like butterflies or bats. Staring at them, Pin clutched the bed beneath her, as though it had started to move.

  They looked like her, or she looked like them. Something in between, something she didn’t know the name of but recognized. A lightness filled her, the way it had when her mother had cut her hair and she’d first put on boys’ clothes. She opened her mouth and let the lightness escape, almost surprised not to see a bubble or a balloon floating away from her, like in the pictures in front of her. How could one feel like this and not be flying? Like the Aerostat or a balloon; like Harriet before she fell.

  Pin set the pages on her lap to examine them more closely. She recognized many of the faces—they all had the exact same features, those of one of the Teenie Weenies in the comic strip.

  “Do you trace them?” she asked Henry.

  “It’s allowed.” He sounded offended.

  “I know. I just meant—they’re so good.”

  She pored over the next sheet, and the next. More Blengins. A boy traced from Buster Brown. A cave that looked like the interior of Hell Gate. Balloons with eyes and teeth like piano keys.

  Pin stopped at a picture of a pair of gigantic hands choking a girl with a grey face. Liquid spilled from her mouth, and her eyes were wide with an expression Pin had never seen on someone who was alive. She quickly pushed it to the bottom of the stack.

  There were other drawings like that one—girls being strangled, girls on fire, girls tied up with string. She avoided looking at them, instead searched until she again found the picture of the dragon and the girl with rainbow wings. She stared at it, mesmer
ized by the dragon’s strange half smile, the way the girl’s arms appeared open to receive something from the sky. All the pictures seemed to tell a story that didn’t quite make sense, unless you maybe knew the man who’d drawn the pictures.

  Yet just because it was a story didn’t mean it wasn’t true. It had only been two days since she’d met Henry. Everything had changed since then. She had become part of a story, a different story from her sister’s, which had been almost the only story she’d told herself for the last two years.

  “Did you make them up?” she asked.

  “It’s a story.”

  “But it’s your story, so you made it up, right?”

  Henry nodded, then smiled without looking at her, a small strange smile like the dragon’s. “I don’t have to make it up.”

  She looked back down at the drawings, shuffled through them one last time, and handed the unwieldy stack back to Henry.

  “I like them,” she said. “Most of them.”

  She shook her head, dazed, and remembered why she was here. She’d thought she could trust Henry—but she’d seen those drawings of the girls being strangled or set on fire. She withdrew her shiv.

  “Look at me,” she ordered.

  Henry stared at the floor, his mouth a stubborn line.

  “Look at me,” she repeated, holding up the knife so he could see it. If he attacked her, she’d stab him and run away. Everyone knew he was crazy. “I want you to swear to me you didn’t hurt those girls.”

  He snorted angrily. “I did no such thing.”

  “What about Abriana Onofria?”

  “Don’t know her.”

  “You’re lying.” She tightened her fingers around the blade’s handle. “You had her picture, I saw it. Look at me.” His head twitched, but he still didn’t raise it. “The Italian girl, Abriana, she was in the papers two years ago. She followed an organ-grinder and disappeared. She was my sister.”

  “The girl.” His hands opened and closed. “Your sister. Which one?”

  “You know which one! You had her picture in your wallet. Did you hurt her? She was my sister.”

  He lifted his head, so slowly it didn’t seem he moved at all. Then he was staring straight at her, his face twisted like a rag.

  “I swear,” he whispered. “By the Gemini. By Elsie Paroubek. I never knew her.”

  “Did you—”

  “No.” For a full second their gazes held. His head jerked violently, as though the effort of looking was too much, and he turned away.

  Pin let her breath out and slipped the knife back into her pocket.

  “Remember the place near where we met by Hell Gate?” she said. “Where you left the note? Meet me there tonight, at eight o’clock. Don’t tell anyone. Not even Willhie.”

  “Willhie’s the night watchman.”

  “You already told me that.” She unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway. “And bring your knife.”

  Chapter 89

  IT WAS TWILIGHT when she returned to Riverview. Max might already be gone. But Pin didn’t believe he was, not yet. He wouldn’t rush off. It was so easy for him to change his appearance—fake mustaches and different color hair, different hats. A man who could turn two faces to an audience, and they would believe each to be his real one.

  No, he was still here. He needed something. Money from the rubes. Another girl. Her fingers brushed the shiv for the thousandth time. She’d never used it, not seriously. Now it felt like a sixth finger.

  Inside her shack, she pulled the filthy curtains and pushed the room’s sole chair against the door, still hanging on its hinges. A useless precaution: a few good kicks and the entire shack would fall down around her in pieces. It still made her feel safer.

  She set down the paper sack and sank onto the mattress, staring at the pictures of Lord Clyde and Harriet Quimby. She removed them from the wall, searched her pockets for the photograph of the doll dressed in Maria Walewski’s clothes, the holy card that Sister Dymphna had given her, and last of all Henry’s card. She set them in a row on the floor beside the mattress, leaning against the wall, then went to the trunk in the corner.

  When she and Abriana were young, the trunk had been big enough for them to hide in, something their mother repeatedly warned them not to do. “Children die from being trapped inside trunks,” she’d said, adding to her list of things that children died from. Lice, consumption, broken glass, chewing tobacco, falling off roofs, freezing to death, eating toadstools. Not hurdy-gurdy men, not dark rides, not watching a movie with a stranger.

  Pin dug her fingers under the latch and prized it open, releasing the smell of camphor. Inside were her mother’s few items of winter clothing. Ugly clothes, all moth-eaten. A boiled-wool jacket, much repaired. Worsted stockings, a long wool skirt. Also, the linen handkerchief that Abriana had painstakingly embroidered with wobbly red Xs as a Christmas present for their mother, and a crushed straw hat that had been her sister’s.

  Pin kept digging, until she came to her own things. A tiny pair of white leather shoes. A chewed-up flannel nightgown that stank of mice. Her own winter jacket, scratchy red wool and far too short. A plain white cotton shimmy and some heavy black wool stockings.

  She picked up the shimmy, and several items fell from its folds. Baptismal certificates, her own and Abriana’s. And a photograph.

  It was the Easter Sunday photo of her sister at Assumption Catholic Church. Abriana smiled at the camera, pretty as a girl in a soap advertisement, in her Easter hat and dress. The newspaper photographer must have given the photo to her mother after Abriana had disappeared. Why had her mother kept it hidden all this time?

  She tried not to cry. After a minute, she put all the clothing back into the trunk, except the cotton shimmy and her wool stockings. She set the picture of her sister alongside those of Harriet and Clyde, Saint Dymphna and Maria’s doll, Henry’s card. Then she opened the paper sack and dumped its contents on the mattress. She unbuttoned her shirt, tossed it on the floor, picked up the middy dress, and felt a spasm of anxiety—what if it buttoned down the back?

  It didn’t. It had no buttons at all—it was designed to be pulled on and off quickly. A costume, not a real dress.

  The thought reassured her. She tugged her old cotton shimmy over her head, then pulled on the dress. It fell just below her knees. A child’s dress, intended for someone younger than Pin. It felt tight around the bust—flat chested as she was, Pin still had breasts. She ran her hands over the front. The fabric was thick enough that, with the shimmy beneath, she couldn’t feel her nipples. She wished she had a mirror.

  She tied the ends of the sailor collar in a clumsy bow, kicked off her boots and socks, and pulled on the hated black stockings, too heavy for summer though everyone wore them anyway. Her boots went back on, boys’ boots but maybe no one would notice.

  All that remained was the wig. She picked it up with a grimace: a cap of stiff blond ringlets, long enough to cover her ears, topped by an enormous cornflower-blue bow. The color almost matched the faded blue of her middy dress. Pin smiled: Glory must have selected it on purpose.

  The wig’s hair and flax had been glued to a flexible burlap form. A loop of string dangled from each side, to go over her ears. She tugged it on, stuffing her own dark curls beneath the blond ringlets.

  It fit, barely—like the dress, it was designed for a younger girl. She slipped the two loops over her ears, did her best to hide them beneath the stiff ringlets, and glared at her discarded clothing on the floor. She still had no idea what she looked like. She stepped to the window and pulled aside the grimy muslin curtain.

  Outside, the sky had darkened to the scummy pea-soup color that preceded a twister. The window reflected a girl, gangly, with bony knees, blond ringlets, and a floppy blue bow that matched her dress. No longer herself but a stranger. She picked up her knickerbockers and removed her knife from the pocket, instinctively reached for her thigh, and swore.

  Her dress had no pockets. Girls’ clothes never di
d. And she was wearing stockings, so she couldn’t even tuck the knife into her sock. She fiddled with her boot until she figured out a way to stick the knife in there without stabbing herself. She practiced pulling it out, poking a hole in her stocking in the process. It was awkward, but she’d be able to grab it when she needed it.

  Other than that, the details of how, exactly, she was going to attack Max were fuzzy. Maybe Henry would have a plan of his own.

  She gathered up the pictures and set them on top of the trunk, got the hurricane lantern, and put it in front of them. She knew better than to leave a lantern lit when no one was there to tend it. But if she didn’t come back, maybe someone would see the pictures there, and understand.

  After a few seconds, she picked up the photo of the doll. She couldn’t leave it here—it was the only proof they had of what Max had done. She realized then that she should have taken the entire wallet. A single photo proved nothing. No one would believe her. Even if they caught Max and questioned him, he would lie. She’d have to go back to his dressing room to get the other photos.

  Chapter 90

  AFTER THE BOY left, Henry straightened the pages of his book and put everything back in his desk. He was disappointed Pin hadn’t read it. He’d written more than two hundred pages. But the boy was right. It would have taken too long, and the Gemini would be busy tonight.

  He didn’t own a pocket watch, so he stepped into the hall and listened until he heard the bells from St. Vincent de Paul. A quarter past six o’clock. He’d missed supper, damn it. Bad luck, fuck! He ducked back into his room, locked the door, and slapped the air in frustration. Slapped himself for thinking a bad word. Dressed in a clean shirt and trousers, clean socks, his dark jacket, and bowler. Pried up a baseboard and found his knife. They’d taken it from him when he arrived, but he bought another. It had a leather sheath, so he wouldn’t cut himself when he tucked it down his socks.

  When he was ready, he stood in front of the air-shaft window and looked at his reflection in the dark glass. General Henrico Dargero steadied himself for the struggles ahead. Only his brave young companion knew of the risks they would soon meet. An evil man, perhaps some bad generals. Maybe death!