by Unknown
He had to know how it was done.
Outside, Abernathy seized the ticket-taker’s sleeve. “Who owns that lamp?”
“Why, sir, I do.” The ticket-taker smiled. He was a small man, ill-favored with the aspect of a toad squatting atop a mushroom stool. His clothes crumpled into him, shapeless and dirty.
“How does it work? Electrical wires? Gas discharge?”
The man shook his head. “Couldn’t tell you. She is as she was when I found her.”
Abernathy pressed down his frustration. It was unreasonable to expect that a carnival barker would know. How could he? Doubtlessly, the man was ignorant of basic scientific principles. But if he could study the lantern, could unravel its secrets . . . the advancement! The acclaim! “How much do you want for it? And don’t say it’s not for sale.”
“Oh, she’s for sale.” An odd look crossed the ticket-taker’s face. Fear, or maybe hope. Or hunger. “For a particular coin.”
“What coin?”
Silently, the barker held out a dirt-creased palm. Upon it gleamed a heavy silver round: a Finisterra nickel, one of the solid globe-and-Liberty pieces that had been minted a decade back to commemorate the charting of the last frontiers on the globe. The Earth was known, its wonders measured and mapped, and the achievement had been stamped into a collector’s coin.
But this one was different. Its Lady Liberty face had been etched into a skull with a raw, bleeding stump for a neck. Darkness pulsed in the metal’s grooves. The sway of shadows across its face lent it an awful semblance of movement—a sense, surreal yet powerful, that something malign lurked and laughed and looked through the empty eyes of that coin.
“She only wants one,” the ticket man said. “If it’s the right one. Then she’ll go to you as she came to me. No other way to buy that lady’s favor.”
Abernathy tore his gaze away with difficulty, swallowing. He’d seen such coin carvings before, although never one so grisly. A gentleman of his acquaintance was an amateur folklore enthusiast and collected them. Perhaps he could be persuaded to part with one. The Finisterra itself was only a nickel. How much could the etchings be worth? A dollar? Five?
He pulled on his gloves. “A deal.”
His acquaintance, the architect Marshall Brown, wasn’t available to help. Brown had embarked upon an educational tour of Italy, return date uncertain.
At first, Abernathy thought his friend’s absence a minor inconvenience. He wanted to discover the lady’s secret for himself. He’d seen the final effect, and he had a fine scientific mind; therefore it should have been no great difficulty to puzzle out how it was done. All the world’s workings followed rational rules.
Yet the mystery of the fiery dancer in the lantern-glass proved impenetrable. No clever configuration of steam valves began to approach what he’d seen in that carnival tent. No sequence of firecracker tricks could trace the faintest shadow of her shape.
Abernathy couldn’t crack it. The problem rose before him like a glass mountain, refusing to grant the smallest toehold. It repelled his understanding entirely.
Day after night after day, he threw himself against it. Weeks vanished into sleepless fever. Abernathy broke appointments, neglected friends, let unanswered letters pile up before his door in a paper bulwark against unwanted intrusions. The pressurized locks he’d built to guard his room hissed and groaned in displeasure at his neglect, their pipes and kettles rattling in dismay.
Abernathy scarcely noticed. He had no time for lesser concerns. His hair grew gray and wild. His cheeks sunk into sallow pits. On the rare occasions that he emerged from his study to renew his supplies of colorants and cocaine, the good people of the city drew their children away.
And at the end of it, he was no closer than he’d been the first time he’d looked into a bubbling pot and wondered what magic turned water to air.
He dreamed of her. The lady in the ghastlight danced through his slumbers, tiny ballerina feet sketching curlicues of fire across his drowsing mind. He saw her smile as a curved dimple in the flames, heard her laughter like the trill of some faraway bird. Abernathy always woke shivering after such dreams, feeling that he’d stood at the precipice of some discovery greater than any inventor before him had envisioned.
But none of his experiments brought her any closer to his waking grasp. He could see no way to catch her magic in his flues.
Finally, in desperation, he went looking for a carnival coin.
He didn’t really know where to find one. His friend, the architect, had purchased his etched nickels from the people who made them, but he’d never named a specific artisan. Perhaps there was none. The point of folk art, after all, was that it reflected a people, not one person. And as Brown remained in Italy, Abernathy couldn’t ask him.
But he had a general sense of who had carved Brown’s coins, and they weren’t his kind of people. A gentleman of learning, Abernathy had always avoided the vagrants and roustabouts who drifted like flotsam around the city’s eddies. He knew they followed rail lines, though, and that their camps sprouted like mushrooms in the shelter of briars and thickets.
Choosing a direction at random—almost at random—Abernathy headed west, following the trains’ path of iron and gravel. He carried a stout walking stick and a hidden pistol against the risk that some desperate might think to rob him. Within an hour, he had an ugly collection of blisters, and his legs protested bitterly against the unaccustomed exertion, but he ignored the pain. Discovery demanded much from those who would be worthy.
Although Abernathy had gone west to prolong the light—he had no wish to stumble upon any desperados after dark—it was well into twilight before he glimpsed the first red flicker of their campfires between the trees. The day was a fading gasp of blue in black by the time he actually reached them.
Five gaunt men in scarecrow rags sat around that fire. A dented tin pan rested on a rock in its center. Something brown bubbled inside. It didn’t quite smell like meat. The men raised their heads as he neared, watching him hungrily and without smiles.
Abernathy patted his pistol pocket for comfort. “Gentlemen.”
No one answered.
Clearing his throat, Abernathy tried again. He took his hand from his pocket. “I’d like to make a purchase.”
“Of what?” asked one. A gray beard, filthy as a saloon doormat, hung down to the derelict’s chest. His mouth was a pocket of darkness in its gnarled mess.
“A coin.”
The men around the fire exchanged a look. Abernathy had the sudden, uncomfortable sense that they had known his purpose before he’d appeared and that his answer conveyed not information but willingness.
Willingness for what? Apprehension twisted low in his gut.
The gray-bearded man stirred the bubbling mass in the pan. “What kind of coin?”
“A nickel. A carved nickel.” Abernathy held his thumb and forefinger apart, absurdly, as if they might not recognize the coin without a show of its size. “The Finisterra. With a skull on it, I suppose. I don’t really know.”
Another glance around the fire. A current of fear, this time. Abernathy felt it amplify through each of them. It hit him last and hardest.
The graybeard shook his head, staring fixedly into the pan. “Can’t help you.”
Abernathy’s tongue was dry as a gravestone. “Surely one of you must carve—”
“Not the kind you want.” The vagrant looked up at him, finally, and there was such a bleakness in his rheumy yellow eyes that Abernathy stumbled back, reaching for his hidden pistol. He tried hard to believe the gun’s promise that he could control whatever peril might be here.
The graybeard didn’t react. He poked at the pan, ignoring the weapon trembling at him from fifteen feet away. “What you want, you buy with your own coin. Ain’t none of us going to pay that toll for you. Not here, not at any camp around here. Go on and ask if you want. You’ll get the same answer. That cross is yours to carry.”
“I don’t have any idea what you
’re talking about.”
“Good for you.” The vagrant shrugged, bony shoulders rustling against his shabby jacket. “Stay lucky, you never will.”
Abernathy bought his own Finisterra nickel. He bought twenty. He bought engraving tools, too, and he set about learning them with the same intensity he’d devoted to mastering the skills of medicine and machinery.
Engraving was close kin to his other arts, and it didn’t take long to develop a basic proficiency with the tools. Soon he was able to mechanize the process of grinding Lady Liberty’s features into facelessness. Having delegated that task to a coal-bellied machine, Abernathy could focus on the finer details of the work. By the fifth nickel, he’d mastered the lines and hollows that transformed the Lady’s face into a skull’s fleshless grin. By the tenth, his carvings were grislier and more detailed than the one the ticket-taker had shown him.
They had nothing of its menace, though. He could sculpt the face of fear, but he couldn’t grip its clammy essence. Abernathy’s carvings remained inert, with none of the awful, pulsing life he’d felt flickering under the thin metal skin of the carnival coin. Somehow, he knew in the deep coil of his bowels that he’d never win the lady without that.
To learn how to find it, he turned to those who had mastered the science and art of fear.
For science, he found a muttering phrenologist who purchased the heads of the criminally insane and boiled them down to skulls in his mold-streaked basement. Abernathy took notes on the deformed dimensions of the craniums that lined the phrenologist’s shelves and tried to replicate them in his carvings. The skulls of madmen, he thought, would surely serve him best. Their very bones had swollen with the extremities of agitation. Ideal.
For art, he sought out a writer of penny dreadfuls, who told him lurid tales in exchange for liquor and laudanum. Every night, after the writer passed out, Abernathy went back to his workshop and tried to scratch the man’s delirious visions into metal. Sometimes, he almost succeeded, especially when he could use shadow to create the space for suggestion that existed between the writer’s words, but the coins never quite came alive in his hands. The metallic tang of their dust never transformed into the cold sweat of real fright.
That was the key. It tickled at his fingertips, just beyond his grasp. Abernathy needed life. That was what he’d felt thrumming in the carnival coin. That was the secret of the lady’s dance.
He didn’t have the power to create it, not by any art or science. No one but the Lord above could draw life from the simple earth.
But maybe he didn’t have to create it. Maybe he just had to catch it.
Ain’t none of us going to pay that toll for you, the vagrant had said.
How wrong he’d been.
He’d planned to begin with animals. Pigeons, maybe, or rats. They could be cheaply purchased, and the bodies were easy to hide. He’d expected to need a few weeks to experiment before he’d be ready to try trapping a human soul in a coin.
Fate had other plans.
A carriage running at reckless speed. A man who didn’t look before crossing. A scream and a squeal and the wet crush of bone. Teeth scattered over the cobblestones like hail. The driver cursing, the horse shrieking. Nothing from the victim save the grotesque soggy labor of breath, the difficulty of it overmastering him.
Abernathy ran forward. Scarcely able to believe his luck, he stooped on the red-slick street, mouthing inane noises of concern. The driver had control enough of the horse to keep its hooves from his head, but its flailing deterred other passersby from coming too near. Perfect.
Abernathy cradled the deflating ball of the victim’s skull in one hand and pressed a fat silver nickel to the sticky pulp of his mouth with the other.
Time faded to nothing behind the hammering beats of his heart.
If no one noticed, if no one stopped him . . .
The victim’s breath blew scarlet bubbles between his fingers. Smaller and smaller they came until the last lacked the strength to break its bloody film. It stuck to the nickel and was still.
Abernathy stepped back, frowning gravely. He picked his fallen hat up from the cobbles and replaced it with a solemn air. “Gone, I’m afraid,” he told the onlookers. “Nothing anyone could have done for the poor fellow.”
Then, victorious, he walked away.
There was a change in the Finisterra nickel, a thrill and thrum in the metal that he’d never sensed before, but Abernathy felt an unexpected tremor of superstition when he thought of looking at it on the walk home.
No. Patience would be rewarded. He’d wait until he got back to his workshop.
When he did, sweaty and breathless from nerves and the eager speed of his walk, he opened his shaking fingers to find a red-smeared skull grinning up from his palm.
It was better than any he’d carved. It was better than them, and it was them, all of them at once: the early ones with the gross, unintentional deformities etched by a clumsy hand, and the late works that rivaled Durer and Dore for their sophisticated depictions of suffering. Every affliction that plagued the phrenologist’s subjects was stamped into that skull, even the ones that could never coexist. The cranium simultaneously dimpled and bulged; the nostrils were both wide and narrow, straight and crooked.
And the horrors . . . the horrors of the penny dreadfuls were all there, lovingly assembled, each and every one tattooed into the nickel’s face.
No mortal hand could have made such a thing. He didn’t like to think what could. Trembling, Abernathy put the coin aside and swept a sheaf of letters over it, burying the image in paper and dust.
He could still feel it, though. He could still see it, staring at him with horrible empty eyes, grinning at him with horrible metal teeth.
Shuddering, Abernathy fled his workshop.
That night he lay in a little tent of blankets on his bed, a lamp burning on the side table as it had when he was a boy, and did not sleep.
A week later, the carnival was back.
It wasn’t the same one. This caravan had two strongmen, not one. In place of a dancing bear it had the Astounding Fish Boy, whose hands were fins and whose skin was scales. The peepshow girls were dark rather than fair, billing themselves as the Sultan’s Daughters instead of the Czar’s White Swans. The barker at the gate wasn’t a dwarf on stilts but a pair of conjoined twins who juggled spinning batons in a double-eight between their four hands.
But it was loud and gaudy and full of bald-faced frauds, and it had a tent billing the Lady in the Ghastlight, the Fairy in the Flames.
Abernathy jostled to the front of the line.
The ticket-taker was the same man he remembered. Older, squatter, more jaundiced, but indisputably the same. “You’re back.”
“I am.”
“You have the coin?”
Abernathy held out a nickel. Not the nickel but an ordinary coin. “Let me see her first.”
The toadlike man made it disappear. “Go on in.”
She was there. Others were, too, but Abernathy paid no mind to their crushing crudeness or the sour smell of the press. The gawkers in the audience counted for nothing. Only she mattered.
The lady danced within her lantern, enchanting and eternal, so pure in her beauty that Abernathy’s eyes filled with tears. The blue flame of her hair whipped across her curved cage, leaving a trail of dazzlement across his sight. He longed to touch her, possess her, lift away that protective glass and feel her fire on his skin.
He stayed until the final show and then, shaken, stumbled out. Around him the carnival’s lights were blinking out, row by row, their steampipes creaking as they cooled. Stale ozone and hot grease suffused the air. Between the tents, the marks and spectators drained away, returning to their workaday world.
The ticket-taker was waiting. “You still want to buy?”
“Yes.” The word came out ugly, guttural, the need in it too raw. Abernathy couldn’t help himself. His fingers curled into his pocket, seeking the solidity of the coin he’d made. He offered
it with a shaking hand. “I have your price.”
The ticket-taker wasn’t as quick to seize this one. He looked at it for a while, and then he looked up at Abernathy. Something like pity flickered across his face. “Not many come back with that. Lots ask, but not many come back. Five, in all the years I’ve been here.”
“You’ve sold her before?”
The man’s smile was impossibly wide. It showed no teeth, only wet emptiness between his gums. “What makes you think I’m the one does the selling? It’s the lady makes that choice. Tells me where to take her, when to go. Five times before she’s done it. Now you’re the sixth.”
“How—”
“She didn’t stay with any of the ones who came before.” The ticket-taker nodded at the graven skull. “That’s the beginning, not the end. A fire don’t just need a spark. It needs fuel. You might think you understand that, and maybe you do, but none of the fellows who came before you did. They couldn’t hold her.”
“But you can?”
The man shook his jowly head. “She don’t belong to me. I just carry her around. Show her to rubes and gawping gulls. Every so often, to someone like you.” He pinched the coin from Abernathy’s hand. “You’ve paid your price. A wiser fellow might change his mind right about now, but then, I reckon a wise one wouldn’t have come back in the first place.”
Abernathy nodded, only half listening. She was his. That was the important part. The lady in the lantern belonged to him.
He waited for an eternity of seconds until the ticket-taker returned. When the man finally came back, Abernathy exclaimed in dismay. The fairy was gone. Only the wick—a slim, straight core of bone—glowed weakly within her lantern. “What trick is this?”
“She’ll come back when you call her. She likes to be admired.”
Scowling, Abernathy took the lantern. He clutched it protectively to his chest as he returned through the dark streets and gaslit avenues to the familiar bricks of his workshop.
There, hastily but reverently, he cleared a space for her amid his gravers and diagrams. The need for those tools was past. The lantern was his.
