Church of Marvels: A Novel

by Leslie Parry

  She tasted turpentine, hair, the oil from other women. Her lungs rattled; her eyes stung, hot and raw. When at last they pulled her out and dropped her on the floor, her hands still tied behind her, she could only roll onto her stomach and retch up the water.

  “Hand me those scissors,” said one to the other.

  “There ain’t no scissors.”

  “I thought I put them on the table?”

  “I said they ain’t here.”

  The nurses scanned the room, while Alphie lay with her cheek in a puddle of sick, trying to keep from crying. Bells clanged in the kitchen, then out in the yard.

  “Fine.” Bradigan sighed. “They can catch their deaths for all I care.”

  They stepped over Alphie and kicked her hard in the tailbone. She watched them march out of the room, their heels smacking up water, laces loose and slithering behind them. As they turned into the hall, she heard Jallow whisper, ashamed, “I really was frightened for my life!”

  “They can’t hurt you,” Bradigan said, soothing. “They’re really nothing but babies.”

  Alphie rolled to her side, her legs locked together, belching cold water through her teeth and nose. Her wet clothes clung to her skin. As the nurses’ footsteps disappeared down the hall, she smelled the nip of a match, the flowery smoke from their cigarettes. They’d be returning to the yard, she knew, to herd the women inside for their drams of mead.

  Desperately she tried to squeeze her hands out of their cuffs, but the soggy rope only grew tighter. She ran her tongue along her penny-tasting gums, worrying her loose tooth, wondering if they would strip her and beat her, send her up to the Violents for good. She looked over to where the other girl knelt cowering in the shadows. A strange sound came from her throat.

  What Alphie saw next made her weak. Something was sprouting from the girl’s mouth. It grew and grew, pushing upward and out, the muscles rippling in her throat. Her lips kept moving as if she were saying now! over and over again. Now, now, now, now! Then she gagged and spit. A pair of scissors went clattering across the floor, pulling a long, clotted thread of mucus behind them.

  Alphie stared. “What did you do?”

  The girl only coughed and gasped for air.

  Alphie leaned forward. The girl’s tattoo had scabbed over and was beginning to peel, but through Volpe’s bloody thumbprints, Alphie could still read the name. Orchard Broome.

  2

  SEVEN

  IN THE CELLAR BENEATH DOYERS STREET, THE LITTLE GIRL pushed open a door and led Odile into a tunnel. It was dark and cool, redolent with the smells of wood-rot and loam. The cut in her knee throbbed, but she followed the flame of the lantern, trying to stay calm. In the light the walls seemed to quiver, as if they were on the verge of buckling, collapsing, burying her alive. Gazing up at the archway of rough-hewn brick, Odile couldn’t help but imagine her mother in her grave.

  The day of the fire, just after the twelve o’clock show, Odile had been eating lunch at the beer garden alone. All morning her sister had been tense and moody, refusing to do contortions, paring her routine back to a few easy stunts. She even cut the Daring Devil routine—no matter that Odile was already up in the rafters, waiting in her halo and wings. The audience, mostly families with fidgety children and a few bleary sand-bums, clapped tepidly or fell asleep. Meanwhile Mother fumed and paced, her brows drawn together, her eyes hot and black as bits of coal. Afterward Odile didn’t stop to ask what was wrong—she just shrugged a coat over her costume and hurried down the hall. As she passed the dressing room, Mother opened the door and called to her: Come in for a moment, will you? But Odile had just waved her off and continued out of the theater and down the boardwalk. The last thing she wanted to do was sit around and watch them argue. Belle was most likely doing this to antagonize their mother, and Mother would respond in kind with a scene of self-righteous ire. Even when they fought, it seemed they were only trying to outperform each other.

  At the beer garden she tried to put it out of her mind. She read a newspaper and drank a cold glass of lager. She smelled the smoke, but she didn’t think anything was amiss at first—there was always some kind of mishap or commotion going on, every weekend of spring. But then she heard people pushing back their chairs and gathering at the edge of the terrace. Looking up, she saw a black cloud billowing into the sky. The crowds on the boardwalk were drawn, mothlike, toward what was burning—she couldn’t see it from where she sat—and then the volunteer fire brigade was clanging down the street. It’s that building, someone yelled, the one that looks like a cake. Odile stood up, spilled her beer. She started running. She didn’t think of her mother at first—robust, resourceful, quick-witted Mother—but of her sister, gloomy and aloof, slower than usual. Don’t let it be my theater. Don’t let it be Belle. But then she turned the corner and saw the Church of Marvels burning, black and illuminated, like the negative of a photograph. She saw Aldovar, too, running down the street. She grabbed his arm—what was it she said to him? Something frantic, babbling, a string of words: In there—she’s in there! Around them a crowd had gathered, awed and gawking, as if it were all part of the show. Odile watched as flames jumped from the roof of the theater and chased down the spokes of the Ferris wheel. She saw people trapped in their carriages at the very top, rocking back and forth, shouting for help. A few climbed out of the windows and onto the beams, their clothes flapping in the smoke. She couldn’t watch. The heat was terrible, the smoke explosive. She couldn’t get any closer—coward!—so she ran toward the open air, the beach, and hid gagging and half-blind under the pier.

  She hated herself for it now.

  Ahead of her the girl with the wooden arm swung out the lantern. Somewhere a pair of rats chittered, scrabbling in the dark. Noises began to echo back to her—laughter in wheezy peals; the trickle and splash of water. The tunnel widened, and soon she began to see rooms branching off to the side—golden burrows filled with smoke. She heard the clink of glasses, the rattle of beads, voices low and sibilant. A woman sang a song somewhere in the darkness, in a language she didn’t know. As they drew closer, Odile peered through the doorways—men were hunched over fan-tan tables and poker games. Under the white lamps the smoke was so thick that she couldn’t see their faces, only roiling clouds where their heads ought to be.

  “What is this place?” she whispered.

  The girl looked back over her shoulder. “The Frog and Toe.”

  Odile knew gambling parlors had sprouted along the Coney Island boardwalk, too—behind the candy store where the floor was sticky with marshmallow paste; under the beer hall where the cops filled their bellies and stuffed their pockets and looked the other way—but Belle had never seemed to take an interest in any of it. She’d been too busy with her swords, her piano. She was so disciplined onstage—her energy focused, her body refined. But sometimes afterward, freed from the theater, away from the constraints of her costumes and paint, she ran a bit wild—like a whip drawn taut and then traveling to crack. Once she and Aldovar had gotten drunk on an empty trolley in the station yard, and Pipkin the beach cop had to bring Belle, singing and listing, around to the house. Mother had just shaken her head and put her to bed. But that was as much as Odile could recall.

  Beside her the little girl whispered, “Can you do the hot sandwich?”

  Odile looked down at her, startled. “How do you know about that?”

  “She showed us once. Four swords and she smoked her cigarette the whole time!”

  The hot sandwich had been the blow-off to Belle’s show: the grand finale. Odile wasn’t sure if the girl was trying to trick her into something, so she just said, “Why don’t you tell me about the tigers?”

  “Oh! Their names were Ulysses and George, and they were very big and strong and had magic shapes.”

  Odile swallowed hard against the burn in her throat. “Shape shifters, you mean.”

  “They could swim underwater,” the girl went on. “In the ocean they grew fins like fishes. They could fight octop
uses and whales.”

  “Yes,” Odile said, feeling her eyes sting. “That’s very true.”

  She craned her neck as they passed the half-lit rooms, listening to dominoes shuffle and click. Hands floated over the tables, drawing croupiers’ wands or fanning cards, but they all belonged to men: knotted and woody, rimed with dirt. She followed the girl around a bend, drawing the valise closer to her chest. How could she be certain someone wasn’t lying in wait to rob her in these tunnels? How would she find her way out to the street if she met with any trouble?

  She needed to get Belle home. Soon the season would be over—summer would burn into autumn; autumn would wash away into snow. Winter was the time their mother had toured, or devised new acts for the spring debut, when the beer stands and music halls were shuttered against the cold. Together, Odile thought, she and Belle could sit by the fire with cups of jasmine tea, sketching costumes, graphing stunts, choosing fabrics and bunting. They would build it up again, side by side. The Church of Marvels: A Living Museum! Human Wonders, Sincere Sensation!

  “What was my sister doing here?” she whispered.

  “Sometimes she came down from the shop to visit us. She couldn’t sleep a lot. But like I said, she’s gone now.”

  “And she didn’t tell you why she’s left? Or where she’s headed?”

  The girl shook her head. “People come and go. It’s always that way.”

  Odile tried to think back to the letter, tease apart anything that might have hinted at an underground warren, or a girl with a wooden arm. Why wouldn’t Belle have mentioned something so unusual? Of all the letters she’d claimed to start—all those seconds, hours, days spent thinking about home—why hadn’t she at least written about this? Even something as simple as, I’ve found work as a shopgirl—or would that be too humiliating for someone like the Shape Shifter to admit?

  “What’s your name?”

  The girl looked back over her shoulder. “Pigeon.”

  “And where are your parents, Pigeon?”

  She cocked her head, as if no one had ever asked her such a thing. “I don’t have any.”

  “Isn’t that funny?” Odile swallowed. “Neither do I.”

  This was the question she found herself returning to over and over, late at night while the empty house settled around her, while mutts in the yard licked the crockery clean and snuffled crabs from under the porch. If she had done just one thing differently that day (turned into the dressing room instead of forging stubbornly ahead—a mere step), would she even be alive? Would she and Mother be dead together in the ground? Or would something else have happened? Maybe if she’d walked through the dressing-room door, just as her mother had asked, she might have saved her. She might have rescued her from the fire instead of crying to Aldovar and hiding on the beach. Her mother would be alive, her sister safely at home: three pairs of boots left to dry on the porch after a morning walk by the sea.

  If anything, Odile thought, their mother’s death ought to have inspired Belle to stay, to continue the Church family legacy. Everyone knew Mother was crafting Belle in her image. And everyone adored her. Why hadn’t that been enough?

  The girl lifted the lantern higher. “You look like her, you know, just funnier.”

  Odile gritted her teeth. She never understood why people insisted on saying that, as if she weren’t reminded of it every time she and her sister had brushed out their hair in the mirror at night. Everyone knew that Belle, with her lithe body and cut-glass jaw, was striking, if not beautiful. Next to her Odile, even with the same features, felt shrunken and warped, as plain as a teaspoon bent in the heat.

  “Your hairs are different,” Pigeon explained. “Yours is smaller.”

  Self-consciously Odile touched the coil at the nape of her neck—Belle never wore hers so tight.

  “And you’re littler,” Pigeon continued. “The littler sister.”

  “I’m her twin sister,” she said.

  “But you’re like this—” She tilted her body at the hip.

  “Yes, I know,” Odile replied, pressing at the bandage on her knee. She felt suddenly small and hobbled, no bigger than the rats scuttling in the mud. Around her the tunnels echoed with shouts and trills, a garbled song. Her breath began to feel tighter in her lungs. She thought she heard a heavy, scraping sound in the distance, like a body being dragged.

  “Pigeon,” she said, trying to keep her breath steady. “How did you lose your arm?”

  Pigeon shrugged matter-of-factly, the metal socket creaking at her shoulder. “That’s the way I was born.”

  “And what is it, exactly, that my sister has left down here?”

  “It’s a surprise for you!”

  Odile felt the mark behind her ear begin to burn. “Listen,” she said, taking the girl by the elbow and crouching down in the dirt. “If I find out that you have lied or tricked me—if I find my sister has come to any harm—I will send the tigers after you. Do you understand?” She leaned in. “The new ones are as big as horses. And they can smell a person from a hundred miles away—they’re just waiting. And the longer they wait, the hungrier they get. All I have to do is whistle.” She brought her fingers to her mouth.

  “I’m not a liar,” Pigeon said. “I’ll really show you.”

  At the end of the tunnel they passed under an arch, then stepped down into a cavern. Odile heard echoes coming back to her—the whispery chatter of children—and saw Pigeon’s lantern pick out tiles along the wall. She paused, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. Above her the green brick walls had the look of a moldy honeycomb—stippled with alcoves and thrown into relief by dim, smoky lamps. It was an old crypt, she realized, a forgotten vault—maybe one of those churches built on a Frenchman’s pasture a century ago, then razed as the city bulged and steamed and ate up everything wild.

  But she didn’t see any remains—only children, peeking out from the alcoves like bats—a wall of glittering eyes, looking down on her with fearful, bewildered wonder. A few rushed toward her, but Pigeon batted them out of the way. “She’s going to see the play!” she told them. “The play!”

  Odile’s heart beat faster. What was it her sister had left for her to find? In some of the alcoves she saw smaller versions of the Frog and Toe rooms: a makeshift saloon, where roughed-up boys sat with saucers of whiskey on their knees. Another where children squatted over marbles and dice, and a mutt chased after rolls gone astray. One held a kind of trading post, where a boy and a girl organized newspapers, cigarettes, rolls of yarn and twine, walnuts, matchsticks, used candle nubs and spoons. The boy wore five neckties, the girl three petticoats, all different shades of white and edged with mud. The alcoves were stacked five high, joined with a criss-cross of ladders and rope—one boy hoisted a milk-crate up by a pulley, singing a tuneless song to the creak of the wheel.

  Odile held tighter to her valise. At the end of the cavern they followed a passage into another room, this one smaller, dark. At one end a low stone platform had been turned into a stage. Above it hung a curtain: a white sheet strung across a bowline. On the walls a few torches—limelights—whickered in their grooves.

  A stage.

  Pigeon and the other children set to work. They drew the curtain taut and tied the corners down. Odile took a tentative seat on the edge of her valise. The torches hissed and flickered beside her, throwing feverish shadows on the walls. She heard the children bustling behind the curtain—hisses and whispers, the clatter of props, a few injured whines. After a few minutes a hand emerged and gave a signal. Two boys sat down on a box with a fiddle and a horn. Another blew out the lanterns and snuffed the torches. Odile was suddenly in darkness; she couldn’t see anything, not even her hands, clenched and sweating in her lap.

  Now in the dark of an underground tomb, a light began to glow. It bloomed slowly behind the sheet, rippling out to the edges. As the fiddle larked and dipped, a figure appeared in silhouette—it was a shadow play, Odile realized. The boy, in profile, bowed to an imaginary partner. He bro
ught a monocle drolly to his eye and doffed a top hat. Then he swiveled to face the other direction, and his figure transformed into that of a girl. She fluffed out her skirt, blew a kiss through the air, waved her handkerchief. Odile leaned forward. This was Aldovar’s routine.

  One by one the shadows emerged, distorted but sure, billowing behind the makeshift screen. A girl lifting what looked like a glass bulb to her lips. A blindfolded boy flinging sticks through the air. Another girl twirling and dancing, four-legged. Odile leaned forward, her breath catching in her throat. Birdie, Mack, Georgette. The shadows danced and mimed. The fiddle fallumped to a finish; the horn keened. Odile clapped, alone in the hush of the chamber. The sound of one person’s hands coming together, without answer, seemed unusually sad.

  Then, as the fiddle started up again, a taut shimmer in a minor key, another figure stepped out from the wings. The sheet rippled; the lantern hissed. Odile recognized the silhouette of Pigeon’s arm as she fluttered sideways into view. On her head were two horns, in her fist a bouquet of lightning bolts. She was dancing a simple jig. Odile felt the tears start to well in the back of her throat. The Daring Devil. She watched, breathless, as Pigeon drew a bolt through the air with a flourish, as she tipped back her head and opened her mouth, as the bolt magically disappeared down her throat like a gulped worm. But there was no angel here, no Odile swinging down from the rafters. The devil was onstage, alone.

  The fiddle played faster and faster. The silhouette danced. All of Belle’s rhythms, in shadow, in miniature. But when the silhouette turned to the side, something looked different. Wrong. At first Odile thought it was just a trick of the light, the way the sheet snapped and swayed. She leaned in closer. The devil, ghoulish and merry, lifted another bolt in the air. A flame popped in the lantern; Odile jumped. She stared, dizzy, at the sight in front of her, her mouth dry, her skin tight. The silhouette’s belly was swollen, plump. The devil dancing, and with child.