“Baba–” At Mussorgsky’s grimace, I stop mid-name. “The witch.”
“You know where you must go, then.”
I curse myself for ignoring a simple fact that’s been staring me in the face since my first walk down the Exhibition hall. “I must enter her picture.” I think back to the album I studied at the Faircloth house. “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs, as you called it before.”
“You will find your answers there.” His eyes take on a sad cast. “Both to questions you have asked and others you have yet to consider.”
“I’m not so sure about that. I can consider quite a bit.”
“From your lips, Lady Scheherazade.” He glances about. “Is that all you require?”
I raise an eyebrow. “And what could I possibly be keeping you from in your little dungeon of skulls?”
“Oh, I have nowhere to be. It’s just that I had a notion your instincts led you here for a bigger purpose than to obtain answers you already possess.” He cocks his head to one side. “Tell me, Scheherazade, what is it you really wish to know?”
He’s right. I’ve been holding back, half afraid of what I’d find if I probed further. “Why this place, Mussorgsky? Why the Exhibition? Do you and the others know where you are? What you are? Hell, who you are?”
Mussorgsky looks away, his face turning up into a furtive smile. Before I can ask another question, a strangely familiar sound fills the space.
Humming.
Like a certain boy in a place very far from here.
Scheherazade’s theme.
“On some level,” he says, “everyone knows their true nature. Some hide it well, and some even delude themselves into believing they’re something they’re not. In the end, however, everyone knows.” His piercing gaze sends a chill to my core. “Everyone.”
“Another question I already had the answer to.”
“Sometimes the answers we already know are the hardest ones for us to see.”
A grim smile blossoms on my face. “If cryptic is the order of the day, I’m not certain there’s any reason to continue this conversation. Do you?”
“You could stay and keep an old man company.” He spreads his arms wide in a sweeping gesture. “The skulls do an awful lot of whispering but their ears are long gone and they don’t tend to listen much anymore.”
“As tempting as that sounds, I’m afraid I must be going.” I glance back the way I came. “Any thoughts of how to get back to the main hall of the Exhibition? I came via the castle, but Modesto’s home is no longer safe. I left a rather angry witch there when I joined you here and don’t relish the thought of another encounter with her. At least not till I’m ready.”
“That is wise, fair lady, and I may indeed be able to help you.” He brings his hands together before his chest and cracks his knuckles. “This Exhibition, as you said upon our meeting, is my creation, but a piece of it is more you than me. Do you remember? Other than this place, what is the one picture the witch has yet to invade?”
It comes to me in a second. “The home of the two Jews. She’s never set foot in Goldenberg and Schmuÿle’s place that I’m aware of.”
“Go on.” Mussorgsky cocks his head to one side and gives me a smiling nod.
“Anthony’s never met Sterling or Bolger as far as I know, so how would he―” My mouth turns up in a bemused smile. “I get it. That little corner of Anthony’s brain is my turf.”
Mussorgsky makes a conciliatory wave. “That is one way of saying it.”
“But I still don’t understand. How do I get there?”
Without another word, Mussorgsky raises his hand and a conductor’s baton appears in his nimble grasp. He waves the slender length of wood in graceful rhythm and as if in answer, the sound of violins at the high end of their register fills the space. A few seconds later, woodwinds break in, the tune a familiar one. A variation of the “Promenade” theme, this darker, sadder version echoes those same thirteen notes I first heard upon my initial descent into Anthony’s mind, a melody that has followed me every step of my sojourn through the Exhibition.
Mussorgsky smiles at me. “You recognize the melody.” I’m not certain if some look of recognition on my face brought his compliment or if somehow he read my mind.
“This piece. It serves as a bridge between all the others.”
“Precisely. The name of this section, ‘Cum mortuis in lingua mortua,’ translates literally as ‘with the dead in a dead language’ as I believe you already know. More melancholy than its previous incarnations in the suite, this second part of ‘The Catacombs’ melody is indeed a simple variation of ‘Promenade,’ the melody I crafted to lead the listener from one piece to the next.”
The baton undulates in his hand, the gentle back and forth motion reminding me of the witch’s broom. Over the next few seconds, the music filling the space shifts from dark to bright, dismal to cheery. Mussorgsky waves the baton at the wall of skulls to his left like a sorcerer’s wand and the grisly bulwark opens into a doorway beyond which rests the rich carpets and lush furniture of Goldenberg’s study.
“And just like that, Dorothy is returned to Kansas.” I glance down at my sandaled feet and laugh. “And I don’t even have to click together any ruby slippers.”
“If we meet again, you will have to tell me more of this Dorothy, but for now, I suggest you go quickly. While it’s true you are trapped in the Catacombs with this decidedly aged composer, like him, you are also safe from the witch’s machinations within their bony walls.” He motions toward the open doorway with the baton and takes another bow. “Out there, neither I nor the souls of these thousand skulls can protect you. I suggest you watch your back.”
“I will.” Stepping to the door, I turn back for one last question. “You do know, don’t you? Who you are?”
“Better than you, my dear, though you are indeed insightful.” With his free hand he motions to the gloom that surrounds us. “The Catacombs are the only place the witch cannot go and therefore the only place secrets other than hers are safe. Things can be known here, even if they are not shared. Now hurry back to the Exhibition before she discovers you’ve returned. She’s quick, that one, but even she can’t be everywhere at once.”
“Thank you for everything…” I stumble on the next word. What to call such a man?
He laughs. “You may call me Modest, if you wish.”
“Pun intended, I’m guessing.”
“Perhaps.” He cocks his head to the side and offers me one last smile.
I return his mischievous grin. “Thank you, Modest.”
I step through the door and onto the plush carpet of Goldenberg’s study. After my time in the Catacombs, the dim lighting of the room appears as bright as noonday sun. The insane monkeys dancing across every square inch of the wallpaper all turn and giggle at my entrance. I turn back to tell Mussorgsky one last goodbye only to find the wall sealed behind me as if the door never existed. The space filled with an ornate full-length mirror, the olive-skinned woman staring back at me is fully clothed again, her green sarong restored and the dagger at her side glinting despite the room’s muted light.
I turn and suppress a laugh at the scene before me. Asleep in their respective chairs, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle seem hell-bent on deciding who can snore the loudest. Goldenberg’s dark features bring flashes of my recent falling out with Sterling, and I decide it best to leave without waking them.
Creeping past the two sleeping men and into the next room, I close the door to the study with a quiet click. I search the place for a way out and fail, every door leading to yet another room of opulent extravagance. Then it occurs to me. I’m looking for the wrong type of door.
I scour the house again, going from one of Goldenberg’s paintings to the next, brushing my fingertips across each canvas, and still nothing. I’m somewhere along the Exhibition, but I have no way to get to the hall, and there is no composer here to point me in the right direction. Frustrated, I kick the wall, leaving an ugly crack in
the previously perfect plaster.
“Why so angry, Lady Scheherazade?” Startling at first, Goldenberg’s deep voice summons conflicting emotions from deep within. “Is it such a terrible fate to visit my home a second time?”
I turn to face the master of the house. Not surprisingly, he isn’t alone.
“Can’t you see, Samuel? She can’t figure it out.” Schmuÿle’s leering grin and nasal tones raise the hairs on my neck. “So simple, and yet she can’t see it.”
“Can’t see what?” I ask. “Will one person in this place please speak in something other than riddles?”
“Behave yourself, Schmuÿle.” Goldenberg leads Schmuÿle and me back into the study. He offers me a high-backed chair in the corner before he and Schmuÿle retire to their respective ends of the couch opposite. “Now, fair lady, how may we assist you?”
“You speak for both of us now, do you?” Schmuÿle says.
“Quiet.” Goldenberg’s eyes flare with barely kept anger. “Lady Scheherazade, it is clear you’re upset. What can I do to help?”
“I’ve been to the Catacombs and met who resides there. With many questions answered, I seek to return to the Exhibition, but cannot find the way.”
“I told you, Samuel. She’s lost. Lost in this maze of a house you’ve built.”
Goldenberg ignores his erstwhile roommate. “You seek to return to the main hall, then?”
“The others. I left them with the witch. I need to find out if they’re okay.”
“Always putting others ahead of yourself. That is why you are the storyteller and we merely the stories.”
“Can you help me?”
“We can.” Schmuÿle winks at me. “Whether or not we will is another matter entirely.”
Goldenberg plants his palm on his forehead. “Once more, Schmuÿle, and you can go stay with the witch in the Russian wood.”
With a huff, Schmuÿle crosses his arms and looks away, though he does keep his silence. Goldenberg turns back to me. “I met the composer once. A gentle, wise man. What did you learn from him?”
I think for a moment. “Everything I asked him, I already knew.”
“I would argue you already know the way out of your current predicament as well.”
“But how? None of the doors go anywhere but another room and unlike the Exhibition, your paintings are nothing but that.”
“Ah, but when you look at the paintings, you look at another.” Goldenberg wears the same mischievous grin Mussorgsky wore minutes before. “Perhaps you are looking for the wrong thing.”
“Or at the wrong thing,” Schmuÿle says.
Goldenberg’s words from before return to my mind.
“It would seem you’ve visited the Exhibition so often you’ve become one of the exhibits.”
“This place. It’s me.”
“Precisely.” Goldenberg leans in. “And if one wishes to look upon oneself?”
Without a word, I stand and go to the mirror. The woman looking back is confident, though her eyes betray a hint of fear. “To return to the hall, I have to go through the looking glass?”
“Indeed,” Goldenberg and Schmuÿle say in unison.
Fascinating. First Dorothy. Now Alice.
Goldenberg rises and joins me at the mirror. The image of Sterling and me standing together sends my heart racing.
Dammit.
I meet his reflected gaze. “I suppose this is goodbye, then.”
“Fear not, Scheherazade. We may yet meet again.”
I glance across my shoulder. “Farewell, Schmuÿle. Thanks for the delightful conversation.”
“How… amusing.” Schmuÿle rises from the couch, pulls his threadbare coat about his gaunt midsection, and slinks out of the room. “Have fun storming the castle,” he mutters before slamming the door shut behind him.
I turn back to Goldenberg. “I do hope we meet again someday.”
He touches his fingertip to my forehead. “A part of me will always be here. Like you said, this place is as much you as anyone else.” He smiles and gestures to the mirror. “Now, go.”
As I step through the mirror’s polished surface, the various characters I’ve met on the Exhibition rush through my mind. Witch, gnome, troubadour, schoolmarm, farmer, ballerina, the oddest couple imaginable, the four women of the market, and now the composer himself. All so real, and yet all just a figment of a boy’s vibrant imagination.
Mussorgsky’s words echo in my mind.
“On some level, everyone knows their true nature. Some hide it well, and some even delude themselves into believing they’re something they’re not. In the end, however, everyone knows.”
My foot comes to rest on the parquet floor of the Exhibition hallway. The space is unusually quiet and the lights even dimmer than I remember. The fresco above my head for the first time is blank with no mythological beings or comic book heroes there to keep me company. The stale odor of smoke wafts from the Gnomus alcove up the way. The sound of falling stones echoes from the alcove of The Old Castle and I sneak up the hall to take a peek. There, framed for anyone to see, Modesto’s castle lies in ruin. The splintered drawbridge hangs crooked, half-devoured by the monstrous lobster-thing from the moat, while all that remains of the main wall and its fine battlements is a pile of rubble.
The last bastion of sanity along the hall and I’ve destroyed it. Only the realm of the witch remains, the last place I want to go and the only one that will provide the answers I seek.
“Satisfied, are you?” The metallic bite to the words sends an icicle through my heart. I turn to find Baba Yaga staring at me. No mortar. No pestle. No broom. Just her and that wiry body, foul iron teeth, and grungy hair. Her eyes, always full of such venom, appear sad. Almost regretful.
“He was right.” I feel my lips turn up at the corners and hope my face is more smile than snarl. “You are fast.”
“I know everything that happens in my Exhibition.” She pulls air through her nostrils with a loud snort. “Your scent carries far, storyteller.”
“What have you done with the others?”
“I assure you they are safe. My quarrel is not with them, as well you know.”
“Then what is it you want?”
The witch’s eyes narrow. “Now you ask, now that every place but the Russian wood where I reside has been spoiled beyond repair. Now you deign to ask what it is the old witch wants.”
“You didn’t have to destroy those places. You’ve had every opportunity to talk with me.”
The sadness in the witch’s face shifts to exasperation. “And if a thief enters your home in the night, you would offer her a drink and a blanket? Forget not which of us is the intruder.”
“And I will keep intruding until I find Anthony. You could have ended this long before now, but you have chosen to dismiss and ignore my every effort to find and free him.”
“The boy is safer this way.” She covers her mouth, realizing she’s said too much. “We are all safer this way. None of us in pain, none of us suffering, none of us in danger.” She points a long, crooked finger at me. “Except from you.”
“But don’t you see? All of you were suffering even as I walked the Exhibition the first time. Tunny, all alone and lonely in his abandoned forest. Modesto, his beautiful music unappreciated in his empty castle. Antoine, alone despite the sea of children surrounding him. Hartmann, his entire existence literally turned upside down. Trilby, forced to dance at the whim of any passerby. Goldenberg and Schmuÿle, perpetually arguing over nothing. Even you, Baba Yaga, are forced to rule here by mortar and pestle. The rest all fear and hate you.”
“Fear? Yes. Hate? That is a matter of perspective.” She peers off into the distance. “I provide order to this place. Keep the various exhibits in line. Discipline them when needed.”
“When needed? You’ve destroyed nearly every canvas but your own.”
“And whose fault is that?” Foul spittle flies from her iron teeth. “Each of the exhibits was quite satisfied with their lot unt
il you came along. I could argue you are as much responsible for the destruction as I am. Perhaps more so. Hate me if you will, Lady Scheherazade, but you cannot argue the fact I am needed.”
“In this realm, perhaps, but for every moment this realm exists, the boy I seek remains a prisoner in his own body and no one can help him or even reach him but me.”
Baba Yaga opens her mouth to respond but holds her tongue, stroking the misshapen mole at the tip of her chin as she considers her next words.
“I take it you spoke to the composer,” she eventually whispers, her voice no louder than the wind whispering through the ruins of Modesto’s castle.
“I found him in the Catacombs. Or at least, he found me.”
“What did he tell you?” she asks. “Lies, no doubt. Lies about me.”
“He told me you hold the answers. That they rest in your realm and within your hut.” I take a breath. “He told me of the Dark Day.”
Her flesh, already the color of dead fish, grows a shade paler at my words.
“We do not speak of that day.” The witch turns and heads for the alcove where her painting awaits. “None of us.”
“And that’s the problem. The whole lot of you ignore the real issue at hand, living your sham lives as if any of you even exist, while the boy whose mind you occupy suffers in silence. And you’re the worst of all. The warden of this prison.”
“This place is a thing of beauty.” The witch’s eyes burn through me. “Or at least it was.”
I return her glare. “A beautiful prison is still a prison.”
“You’re no prisoner here.” She motions to the walls surrounding us and snarls. “More like a rat that keeps popping back in for a bite of cheese. Now, begone from this place.”
“Begone, begone, begone. Is that all you can do? All the fearful reverence the people in this place give you and all you can do with the one thorn in your side is send me away time and again?”
“Dare set foot in the picture at the end of the hall and you’ll wish you had stayed away.” She raises a hand to banish me from the Exhibition, but before she can utter a word, I turn my back on her and head for the enormous chained door at the end of the hallway.
The Mussorgsky Riddle Page 26
