Magruder's Curiosity Cabinet

by H. P. Wood

  “But Magruder’s is a question of public health!”

  McGrath frowns. “You know, kid, it occurs to me that the person who fingered Magruder’s as a problem, the only person who seems to care about some dusty warehouse full of shrunken heads, is you. What’s your problem with that place, boyo? Lemme guess: Your girl decide she preferred that legless Negro to you?”

  Around the lobby, checklists and maps flutter as the Committeemen try not to giggle.

  “What! Most certainly not!”

  “Are ya sure, ’cause I was over there a few days ago, and…he’s not my type, but he’s one damned attractive little man.”

  More fluttering of paper, like an amusing wind sweeping across the ballroom floor.

  “Listen…” Gibson senses a great fortune slipping through his fingers. “Magruder’s is bigger than the Cough.”

  “What’s bigger than the Cough?”

  “Politics.”

  McGrath laughs. “That’s the first honest thing out of your mouth in two days. So, how about I be honest with you: I tried with that place, I really did. I got two men still missing, remember? So I go out there, figure I’ll check it out myself. The Reynolds kid says no, this building is ours. I don’t like it, but I do as I’m told. Why? Politics. Now here you are, telling me never mind, go torch the place as planned. And why? Politics.”

  “Yes, but Senator Reynolds—”

  “Reynolds is just another escaped monkey to me, you follow?”

  “McGrath, the senator gave me strict instructions to have Magruder’s destroyed. And I promise you, I’m not going anywhere.” Gibson shrugs. “Truth is, I’ve got nowhere to go.”

  McGrath leans back in his chair and rubs his eyes. All that shrieking is making his head pound. “Kid, I never liked Magruder’s—I hate all that creepy stuff, to tell you the truth. But you know what I like even less than Magruder’s?”

  Gibson rolls his eyes. “I get it. Politics.”

  “No,” McGrath says. “You. I don’t like you. But you’re one nuisance animal I can get rid of. So, all right, I’ll send a team. I’ll even go with you. And if I see something I don’t like, maybe we’ll torch it. Then you scuttle out to Newport and let me get on with my job. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir!” Gibson smiles. He can almost feel Newport’s exclusive ocean breezes whistling in his ears. The next map they draw of Coney Island is going to have his name on it.

  Chapter 48

  Knock Knock Knock

  Nazan and Zeph lead Kitty to the room where her mother lies unconscious. Kitty gasps when she sees her—the black poison that started in her mother’s neck has crept through her veins, giving her whole face a dark, spidery appearance. She looks a thousand years old, and her breath comes out in long, slow hisses. Kitty sits beside her, trying not to cry.

  “Kitty,” Nazan says miserably. “The medicine… I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to work like we hoped. I just don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”

  “No!” Kitty turns her fierce eyes on Nazan. “You mustn’t say you’re sorry. You mustn’t. You’ve done so much for us. You’ve tried so hard—both of you. No, you mustn’t ever be sorry. No one could ask more.” She wipes her eyes and turns back to her mother, reaching out to move a strand of hair from her face. “Has she spoken at all? Anything?”

  “Um.” Zeph glances at Nazan, remembering all too well Mrs. Hayward’s one moment of consciousness, in which she hysterically cursed her daughter for abandoning her. “You see, English—”

  “She said she loves you,” Nazan interrupts. Zeph opens his mouth but closes it when he sees Nazan’s you-shut-up glare. “She only woke up once, and she thought I was you, and she said how much she loves me and how relieved she was to see me. Meaning you. She said she always knew you’d come.”

  Kitty nods. “Thank you.”

  Nazan touches Zeph’s shoulder. “Let’s leave them be. Kitty, let us know if you need anything.”

  In the hall, Zeph whispers, “That for sure ain’t what she said.”

  Nazan nods. “It’s what she meant.”

  By the bed, Kitty swallows hard. There have been many things Kitty has been wanting to tell her mother, so much she wanted to say and thought she’d never get the chance. But now, sitting in this strange bedroom on the third floor of the strangest place she’s ever been, Kitty can’t remember a single thing.

  • • •

  Inside the tavern, chatter is split between the past—Where have you been? What has happened?—and the future—When will the Committee arrive? What will we do? Enzo collapses, exhausted, into a chair, and Rosalind perches on his knee, whispering secrets in his ear. Timur has joined Archie and Digby at the bar, but he turns when Zeph and Nazan come in.

  “I put the boy in the lab,” he announces. “I give the medicine, but he need more. Celik, you get to work.”

  Nazan sighs, frustrated. “Dr. Timur, I just don’t think the colloid is working the way you want. Mrs. Hayward just keeps looking worse, and I—”

  Timur waves a hand in front of his face, dismissing this notion. “The old woman is sick too long, is too late. P-Ray, you save. Go. Work.” He turns back around.

  As she heads up the stairs, Zeph announces his total disinterest in anything beyond the contents of the icebox in the tavern’s back storeroom.

  “Nothing in it,” Rosalind says. “I’ve had no luck at all finding supplies under the quarantine.”

  Zeph scoffs. “What do you mean, no luck at all? I ain’t been gone forty-eight hours! How’d you let this place go to pot so fast?”

  “I’ve been a little busy with a certain funeral, Zeph!”

  “Funerals are supposed to have food, Ros! Don’t you know anything? Let me go look. There must be something.” Zeph makes his way toward the back room, but his path is blocked by a fashion-forward floor-length skirt. Vivi.

  “Monsieur Zeph,” she says breathily, “I am so happy to see you!”

  Archie recognizes Vivi immediately. “What is Mademoiselle Leopard Lady doing here?”

  Zeph can’t help but grin. “We got her cats in the back, Archie. They’re under Magruder’s protection.”

  She kneels down to Zeph’s height and bats her eyelashes. “My cats, they are so hungry! I am sure you can help us, non?”

  “You know,” Zeph says, “the humans are pretty hungry too. So you’ll forgive me if—”

  Archie raises his glass. “Leopard steaks are excellent.”

  Vivi gasps. “Mon Dieu! How dare you! Vil mécréant! Accapareur de merde d’abeille!”

  “Stupid boy!” Timur snaps at Zeph. “Get your woman under control.”

  “His woman?” exclaims Vivi, and “Oh, good Lord,” groans Zeph, and then Archie offers his opinion, and the room is a swirl of dissension and then knock knock knock at the door.

  Silence.

  Knock knock knock.

  “I told you,” Archie mutters.

  Panic shoots across the room like an Edison experiment gone awry. Timur stands. “I get gun.”

  Zeph hustles over. “No. No, Doc, that won’t get us anywhere. Let me…I dunno, let me talk to them.”

  From his perch, Archie hoots. “Talk to them? About what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know, Archie! Maybe I’ll tell them to shoot the useless jackass at the bar, how about that?”

  “I tried to warn you! Would you listen? No! You’d all rather snuffle over the corpse of some blue-blooded microphallus than attend to the—”

  “You watch your mouth,” Rosalind snarls.

  “Yeah,” Digby agrees. “Shut up about whatever that was.”

  Knock knock knock.

  “All right,” Zeph says. “Someone is gonna have to answer that. I’m open to suggestions.”

  A whispered debate. The most socially useful person to answer the door—Timur,
Magruder’s white male owner—is also the least likely to respond to inquiries in an appropriate manner. But the most skilled at politic responses—Zeph, Magruder’s Negro half man—is the least influential face for the Committeemen to see. Digby is too easily confused, and Rosalind too confusing. Nazan is deemed too honest, while Archie can’t be trusted any farther than he can be thrown.

  Knock knock knock.

  In desperation, Rosalind suggests they split the difference between most appropriate and most able—Timur can open the door, while Zeph lurks behind, ready to tell the doctor what to say. Timur retorts that he does not care to be told what to say.

  The knock comes again, this time accompanied by a voice saying, “Open up in there!” The voice of a man who means business, a strong man who will enter this establishment no matter what. Archie whispers to Digby that he should peek out the window to see how large a contingent is waiting outside. Digby nods and sidles over.

  With a sigh, Timur agrees to let Zeph tell him what to say and goes to the door. He pauses, rolls up his sleeves, puts his hand on the doorknob…then changes his mind and rolls the sleeves back down.

  Knock knock knock.

  Finally, he throws open the door, just as Digby says, “My God, look at ’em all.”

  At the door, Timur stands speechless. Zeph prompts from his hiding place, “Can I help you?” But Timur doesn’t speak. “Doc! Can I help you?” No response, so Zeph repeats the question, a bit louder this time. “Can I help you?” Still no response. In frustration, Zeph pokes his head around the door. “I said, can I—oh.”

  The street is lined with carnies, all in various stages of illness. There’s a cigar vendor and a magician and a three-legged man. A single giantess, a trio of electricians, and the entire Razzle Dazzle Spasm Band. All of them sweaty and sickly and sad. An ice-cream truck is parked on the sidewalk, its back doors propped open, and the bodies of plague-ridden Chinese acrobats spill out. Beside the ambulance is an elephant, half a dozen clowns sprawled across the carriage on its back. An ornately embroidered blanket underneath the carriage declares Steeplechase, the Funny Place.

  An underfed pony drags a miniature fire engine. Whitey Lovett is slumped unconscious in the front seat. His fellow firemen hang solemnly onto the sides of the engine, sad eyes clamped on their dying chief.

  “No,” Zeph says. “Whitey, no.” He approaches the pony slowly, so as not to frighten it, and hoists himself up the side of the fire engine.

  Whitey has the telltale buboes—the thick, black lumps on his neck that declare the end may be near. The blackness has spread—his face is stained like a tattooed man. Zeph puts his arm around his old friend’s shoulder, and Whitey’s head lolls over onto him.

  “Zeph… Hello, Zeph.” Whitey’s voice is raspy and weak, as if broadcast by wireless from a distant shore.

  “Don’t do this, brother,” Zeph whispers in his ear. “You can’t be Jewish and a dwarf and have the plague. That’s the trifecta, remember?”

  Whitey laugh-coughs. “Yeah.”

  From atop the fire engine, Zeph can see janitors and Siamese twins, snake charmers and security guards, tightrope walkers and waitresses. Rotting limbs and aching groins and coughing and tears. All on his doorstep, all looking at him, all wanting…something.

  “Whitey, what is going on?”

  “Spencer Reynolds said come. He said, ‘You want real medicine, find me at Magruder’s.’ Word gets around…”

  “Seems like. All right. Nazan!” Zeph shouts up at the attic window. “Poke your head out here. We need you! Nazan!”

  After a moment, the black cloth covering the attic window falls away, the window opens, and Nazan leans out. “What on earth?”

  “Spencer told these folks to come to Magruder’s for help.”

  She gazes out at a sea of plague-ridden faces. “Zeph,” she calls down, “is there enough silver in the lab to cure all these people?”

  “Sister,” he shouts back, “I don’t know if there’s enough silver in the world, but you best get busy.” Zeph squeezes Whitey in a sideways hug. “Half men gotta do what half men gotta do.”

  • • •

  Gibson stalks across the bridge straddling Dreamland’s brackish lake while monkeys shriek in the distance. He clutches a requisition form signed by McGrath. Cans of fuel, drip torches, fire brooms. Leather boots, goggles. Cotton mattress covers.

  “Mattress covers?” Gibson had asked McGrath’s secretary. “Why are—”

  “For the bodies,” she replied.

  “Bodies?”

  “After the fire, of course. Did you think this was a school picnic, Mr. De Camp?”

  Bodies. Well, it’s not his business how these things are done. His job is to make sure the thing is done at all, and at this, he has been a rousing success.

  Gibson congratulates himself again and tries not to remember the last time he visited Coney Island—strolling Surf Avenue, holding hands with Chastity, the afternoon sun glinting off her long, blond hair. Back at the beginning of summer, before the sickness. Before Spencer basically mugged him in his father’s office. Before Chastity caught the Cough, her porcelain skin going black, her blue eyes filling with pus. Back before everything went wrong.

  The once-refreshing lake is a sickly green color. Dreamland’s landscaping staff is, in McGrath’s terms, F/D, and the lake sits dormant, covered with a film of algae, pockmarked with seaweed and rotting fish. It smells even worse than it looks. A flock of underfed flamingos pick their fussy way across the muck, cheeping at each other about the poor accommodations.

  When Dreamland is mine, Gibson thinks, I’ll make sure things never sink this low. I’ll have a full-time employee who does nothing but hunt and destroy algae, someone who lives to clean and won’t be put off by a little Cough. My personal Algae Man.

  Yes, one day. When Dreamland is mine.

  Chapter 49

  Little Girl

  “Stupid boys!” Timur blocks the tavern doorway. “What do you think you are doing?”

  Digby stands at the door with Whitey flung over his shoulder. Zeph climbs up the side of the door so he can face Timur directly. “It’s pretty simple, Doc. These folks are sick, and Spencer promised ’em medicine. We have medicine.”

  “Spencer is dead! Any minute, Committee is coming, burn our home to the ground.”

  “If we ain’t careful, nobody’ll be able to reach our home ’cause of all the dead bodies in the street. We can’t just let them—”

  “We have no time for play hospital.”

  “He’s right,” Archie calls, lurking in the back.

  “Silenzio!” Enzo approaches the door, and Rosalind follows. “The people need help; we help the people.”

  “Darling,” Rosalind says. “The people have the Cough. We don’t.”

  Zeph nods. “Ros has a point. We should all take doses of Nazan’s cure, every one of us, just to be safe.”

  Kitty has heard the commotion from upstairs and comes down to see what’s going on. “Is everything all right?”

  “Kitty,” Rosalind says as gently as he can. “How is your mother?”

  “Much the same, I’m afraid. Why?”

  “Don’t you see, Zeph? That cure, as you call it, has yet to work on even one person. We have no way of knowing if—”

  Zeph replies, “Only one way to find out. Besides, if Magruder’s is a plague hospital, maybe they won’t be so quick to set it on fire.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Rosalind counters. “We don’t have time for—”

  “Actually,” Digby interrupts, “he’s the one who doesn’t have time.”

  Whitey writhes in pain, murmuring, “Zeph… Where’s Zeph?”

  Zeph reaches over with one hand and squeezes Whitey’s leg. “It’s all right, brother. You just hang on.”

  “Zeph, darling,” Rosalind says, “I kno
w he’s your friend. But what’s the point of bringing him inside so he can die in a fire?”

  “Fire?” Whitey whispers. “What fire? I’m the fire chief. Where’s the fire?”

  Zeph says, “Shh, don’t worry yourself, Whitey.”

  “Oh, we got fires,” he says, dazed. “Beautiful fires. We burn at 10:30, 12:00, 1:30, 3:00, 4:30, and 6:00. Special show Saturdays at 8:00, with extra victims…”

  “Shh, now, Whitey. This ain’t that kinda fire. This is a real fire.”

  “Wait,” Kitty says slowly. “What if it wasn’t? What if it wasn’t a real fire at all?”

  Everyone at the door frowns in confusion. Zeph shakes his head. “What are you even—?”

  But Archie nods. “I knew she had potential.”

  • • •

  Gibson tries to direct the Committeemen loading the big, white vehicle. But wherever they need to be is invariably the exact place he happens to be standing. He gets pushed and shoved so many times, he starts to wonder if they are doing it on purpose. He walks farther away and leans against a tall, wooden fence that marks the outer limits of the park.

  Never mind them, he tells himself. Just this one errand, and I’m off to Newport to deliver the good news. Perhaps there will be a ball going on, incense drifting down from chandeliers as big as automobiles, all the heiresses decked out in ermine and silk. And the senator will greet him with open arms, embracing him, whispering in his ear, I wish I had a son like you.

  Laughter. He glares at the Committeemen, but they all seem occupied with the vehicle—if they are laughing at Gibson, it’s on the inside. But this is explosive, unrestrained laughter, right behind him.

  Behind me? Gibson turns to the fence. A pack of hyenas shoves their snouts between the slats, slobbering, chortling, staring up at Gib with dead, black eyes. He jumps away, cringing.

  Spotting the hyenas, the men reach for their pistols, firing pow pow pow at the slobbering beasts. The men climb the fence to give chase, while the hyenas hit by gunfire curl up on the ground, bleeding and whimpering.