Curiosity (14 page)

“Well?” snapped Maelzel. “Are you going to get up, or do I have to beat you again?”

Slowly, like someone waking, I turned my head toward him and met his glowering gaze. “You won't beat me,” I murmured.

The man laughed, but it sounded slightly strained, a bit uncertain. “I shall do to you whatever I like.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But you won't beat me.”

He continued to stare at me a moment, with a puzzled frown, then abruptly turned away. “We open the doors of the hall in fifteen minutes. You had better be in your place.”

I
T PROMISED TO BE A LONG AFTERNOON,
one that would leave my body stiff and sore. The Turk had again been challenged to a complete game, and I could tell from the very outset that my challenger knew what he was doing. I opened with the old reliable King's Gambit, in which you give Black the opportunity to take one of your pawns. A mediocre opponent will jump at the chance—but if he does, he no longer controls the center of the board. This fellow—I assumed it was a fellow—didn't fall for it; he trotted out his knight instead.

When I was younger, I had often tried the King's Gambit on my father; he had invariably replied with that same countergambit. In my dazed, disoriented state, I began to imagine that my unseen opponent was, in fact, my father. Could the night keeper be mistaken? Maybe he hadn't been hauled off to the graveyard at all; maybe he'd just been released.

The more I dwelt on it, the more real the possibility seemed. It should have comforted me; instead, it made me angry. Why hadn't he come to find me, or at least left a note, telling me he was all right? Why had he let me suffer under the delusion that he was dead?

As you might guess, I'm not normally given to fits of anger. Anyone who examined my skull would find that my organ of Agreeableness is well developed, and my Combativeness is as flat as yesterday's champagne. And in fact the anger didn't seem to be coming from inside me, but from some other source. It was as though I were in a hypnotic trance, with the mesmerist telling me that I was playing chess against my worst enemy and that I must crush him.

Clearly, I wasn't in my right mind. I didn't play in my usual methodical, careful fashion. Instead of analyzing every move and its ramifications, I played totally by instinct, making outrageous sacrifices and apparent blunders. Anyone watching the game must have thought that the machine's clockwork had slipped a few gears; Maelzel must have been ready to tear out his hennaed hair, wondering what the devil I was up to. Each time my opponent took more than half a minute to consider his next move, I drummed the Turk's wooden fingers on the board and rolled his dark eyes.

There was, of course, method in my madness. Though Black captured almost half of my pieces, with the other half I constructed a prison from which there was no escape. Eventually it dawned on my opponent that he was doomed; no matter how impatiently I shook my head or drummed my fingers, he made no more moves. Then the metal ring beneath his king dropped, and I knew he'd conceded.

Slowly I became aware of a faint fluttering sound from outside the cabinet—similar to the pounding of feet I'd heard weeks earlier, when the cry of “Fire!” had cleared the hall, but without the accompanying vibrations. It took me a few moments to realize that what I was hearing was applause.

When I emerged from the cabinet, Maelzel said nothing, only stared at me again as though wondering what had gotten into me. I didn't speak, either; I returned to the workshop, struggled into my back brace, and set about sweeping up. After watching me curiously for a moment, Jacques said, “Those shavings have proven useful,
n'est-ce pas
?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” He jerked his head in the direction of the earth closet. “I heard you leave last night.”

“Why didn't you stop me?”

He shrugged. “I thought perhaps you had a good reason.”

“I did. I went to see my father.” I hoped he wouldn't ask about my father's health; I didn't want to have to answer. I needn't have worried; Jacques seldom kept a conversation going any longer than absolutely necessary.

But, to my surprise, he did say something more. “That was an interesting game,
Porcelet
.”

“The one this afternoon? You saw it?”

He nodded. “I was not sure you were in any shape to perform.”

“I wasn't; at least not the way I usually do.”

Jacques made an unfamiliar sound that might have been a laugh. “
C'est ça
. Your tactics were daring and
dangereuse
—the sort Mulhouse might use.”

“Or Otso,” I said.

He gave me a fierce glance. “What do you mean?”

“I just meant, if he were a person, and not a machine.”

For several minutes, Jacques worked in silence, planing off long ribbons of wood from a piece of ash. Then he said quietly, “The real
Otso was like that. Daring and dangerous. But he was also generous. And loyal.” He shook his head and gave a sad half smile. “And he could drink more
sagardo
than any man I have ever met, before or since.”

“
Sagardo
?”

“Fermented cider.”

“It sounds good.”

He snorted derisively. “It tastes like
pisse
.”

In the weeks that followed, I gradually went back to my old, cautious style of playing. But from time to time I still felt the urge to make a totally outrageous move, and often I obeyed the urge. Sometimes it put me in a real predicament, one that took all my skill to work my way out of. It did keep things interesting, though. And Maelzel grudgingly admitted that audiences loved this sort of derring-do far more than they did a plodding, predictable game.

Even more gradually, I began to recover from the shock of my father's death. The night keeper had told me where he was buried—in the graveyard next to the church whose pulpit he had once occupied every Sunday. The same deacons who had scorned him when he was alive had welcomed him back into the fold now that he couldn't stir up any more controversy.

At first I couldn't bear the thought of visiting his grave; it would be like giving up on him, admitting that he was gone. But I have never liked lying, even to myself, and it began to seem cowardly to me, to keep avoiding the hard truth. I have never been superstitious, either, but I have to admit that the prospect of wandering alone about a churchyard at night was a bit daunting.

I'd said nothing to either Maelzel or Jacques about my father's fate. Again, it would have seemed a betrayal of some kind. Besides, I knew how Maelzel's mind worked: He would conclude that, since I no longer had an urgent need for money, he could withhold my wages again. But the fact was, I
did
need the money—not because it could buy things, but because it meant that my skill and my services were worth something.

Jacques hadn't told our boss about my nighttime forays, at least as far as I knew. Maybe, I thought, I could trust him in this, too. As we sat at the workbench, tinkering with the innards of the mechanical woman—I had taken to calling her Fiona— I said, cautiously, “Would you ever consider letting me out during the daytime?”

As usual, Jacques took his time in replying. At last, he muttered, “
Peut-être
. If it was a matter of life or death.”

“It is.”

“Which one? Life? Or death?”

My reply was almost as slow in coming as his. “Death.”

He grunted. “
Votre père
?”

“
Oui
. He died of cholera.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since that night I sneaked out.”

“Hmm. You want to visit his grave, I suppose.”

“
Oui.
”

There was another long silent spell, then he growled, “We can do it only when Maelzel is gone.”

“We?” I said.

“
Oui
,” he said.

I couldn't help snickering. “We both sound like
porcelets
. Wee, wee, wee.”

Jacques bent his head so that his nose nearly touched the table. He might have just been taking a closer look at Fiona's gears, but I had the feeling he was also hiding a grudging smile.

Our opportunity came a few days later. On Sundays and Mondays, when the exhibition was closed, Maelzel often went away on business—he seldom said what sort, or where. I suspect now that he had a lady friend in the country, but that thought never occurred to me at the time.

Aside from the small hours of the morning, the best time to wander the city unseen was on Sunday afternoon. All respectable people, even the constables, were home having Sunday dinner with family and friends, leaving the streets to those of us who had no family and no friends.

We must have made a curious sight, Jacques and I: A bear-like man shuffling along with the aid of a crutch, and a puny boy who appeared to have gotten stuck inside a bizarre sort of birdcage. But the few people we passed—street urchins, mostly—paid us little attention; no doubt they'd seen far stranger things.

As we approached my father's old church, I sighted a black-clad figure moving about among the stones in the graveyard. “Oh, Lud,” I murmured. “It's her again.”

“Who?” asked Jacques.

“The Woman in Black. I seem to see her everywhere I turn. You don't know her, do you?”

Jacques, who had grown nearsighted from all the close work, squinted in her direction, then shook his head.
“Non
.
”
When we passed through the wrought-iron gate and into the graveyard, the woman spotted us. Abruptly, she turned and hurried off, her long skirts brushing against the lichen-covered gravestones. “Does she ever speak?” asked Jacques.

“Not so far.”

“Ah. Perhaps she is
un
fantôme
.”

“A ghost?” I shivered. “You think there are such things?”

“
Mais oui
.”

“But she looks perfectly real. Besides, ghosts stay in one place. They don't follow you around, do they?”

He gazed off in the direction the Woman in Black had gone. “Perhaps they do, sometimes.”

It was easy enough to find my father's grave; it was the most freshly dug. Though I knew that the live people in graveyards sometimes talk to the deceased, I didn't think Father would approve, so I only knelt by the dirt mound for a while and wept silently. When I rejoined Jacques, he said, “Is your mother's grave here, too?”

“No. Her parents insisted on burying her in the Raybold family plot, but I'm not sure where that is. We never visited the Raybolds; they didn't like Father very much. I think they blamed him for her death. They said that he should have known she was too fragile to bear children.”

“She died giving birth to you?”

“No, but it wasn't long afterward, I think. Father didn't like talking about it.”

Most of the way back to Masonic Hall, Jacques was his usual taciturn self; the effort of plodding along on his mechanical legs made him even more sullen than usual. He made certain that, when we let ourselves into the workshop, no one was around to observe us, not even the spectral Woman in Black.

“Do we really need to be so careful?” I said. “I mean, why would anyone suspect me of being the Turk's operator? Wouldn't they just think I was an ordinary chore boy or apprentice?”

“They might have seen you perform at the Chess Club.”

“Oh. I suppose you're right. But I can't stay shut up in this room forever. I know! I could wear a disguise!”

Jacques gave a derisive laugh. “You would still be four feet tall and hunchbacked.”

“I'm getting less hunched all the time. I think the brace is helping, don't you?”

He grunted noncommittally. “Now, if we take the show to another city, where no one knows you . . .”

“Do you think that's likely?”

“We have talked about it. Eventually, people will stop coming, and it will be time to move on.”

“To where?”

He scowled at me. “How do I know? You ask too many questions.”

J
ACQUES WAS RIGHT; EACH AFTERNOON,
I peered at the audience through the tiny hole in the curtain, and after another week or so of big crowds, I noticed the attendance starting to dwindle. As we were putting away the chess pieces after a performance, I casually asked Maelzel, “Are we taking the exhibition to another city?”

He glared at me. “Who told you that?”

“No one. I just wondered. I—I read somewhere that you've already been to New York and Boston.” Actually, that information had come from Mulhouse, but I knew better than to bring up his name.

Maelzel scratched his head thoughtfully. “I may decide to move, yes.” He seemed to be waiting for a reaction from me. When I said nothing, he went on. “I suppose now you will give me some wretched story about how you could not possibly leave your father all alone.”

“No.”

He raised his plucked eyebrows. “No?”

“I need the job. If you travel, I'll come along.”

“
Sehr gut.
I could have forced you to come, of course, but it is easier this way.” He drew a piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket and unfolded it. “As it happens, I just received a letter from Mr. Poe; you remember him?”

I nodded. “The man who yelled ‘Fire!' because he was losing.”

Maelzel gave a sharp laugh. “Well, he did not do the actual yelling, but he may have hired someone to do it for him. It would not surprise me; he has a devious air about him.” Maelzel tapped the letter. “He is in Richmond now, editing a magazine. According to him, it is a thriving metropolis, and its people have money to spend. He feels the exhibition would be a huge success.”

“He could just be luring us there to get another look at the Turk.”

“That does not worry me, as long as we are careful.” He folded the letter and tucked it away. “It is tempting, particularly with cold weather coming. I would far rather spend the winter in Virginia than in Pennsylvania.”

The prospect of leaving Philadelphia didn't bother me much. It may seem strange that I was so willing to leave the city where I grew up, where everything was familiar to me. But the truth was, I had no great love for the City of Brotherly Love. It hadn't been kind to me. I had felt at home only in the Parsonage. Ever since our eviction, I'd been like a stranger in a strange land. Now, the only place I felt I really belonged was inside that claustophobic cabinet.

By the beginning of November, we were playing to audiences of only fifteen or twenty, which Maelzel used as an excuse to lower wages—not only mine, but those of all his employees. When they complained, he fired most of them, keeping on only two men to disassemble the automata and dioramas and pack them into wooden crates.

These men weren't permitted to handle the Turk. Jacques and I pulled poor Otso apart at the waist and placed his torso gingerly in a box filled with shavings. His lower body didn't require such care; it was made of solid wood. We removed the clockwork and the mechanical arm from the cabinet and laid them in a nest of crumpled newspapers; the cabinet went into a padded crate all its own.

As I was removing the maple doors and wrapping them in cloth, I noticed a spot in one corner of the cabinet's interior where the felt lining bulged just slightly, as though some tiny object were lodged beneath it. Carefully I lifted the edge of the felt and coaxed the object from its hiding place. It was an earring, a single pearl dangling from a silver hook. When I held it closer to the window and examined it, I saw that the silver was tarnished with some dark brown substance—a substance that I was very familiar with. As a young child, I was subject to frequent nosebleeds, and no matter how diligently Fiona laundered my handkerchiefs, most of them remained spotted with dried blood.

“What do you have there?” demanded Jacques.

“Oh, nothing.” I shoved the earring into my trouser pocket. “A chip of dried glue from the cabinet, that's all.” I didn't think it wise to mention the earring or ask who it had belonged to. The answer was obvious. It would have been downright foolish to ask why it was caked with dried blood.

Our boxes were loaded, along with at least fifty others, onto a huge freight wagon pulled by six draft horses. Maelzel's two remaining craftsmen rode in the wagon bed, to keep an eye on the crates and their contents, some of which were irreplaceable.

I wouldn't have wanted their job. I had overheard the draymen talking about the main highway that ran south from Philadelphia. They called it the King's Road, but it sounded more like the road to perdition—except that the latter is said to be paved with good intentions, whereas the former was paved with nothing but a few planks laid down in the boggiest spots. And the freight wagon had no suspension at all to even out the bumps; I only hope that Maelzel paid those poor wretches well for their services—though I doubt it.

In good weather, stagecoaches traveled the King's Road daily, carrying mail and a few hardy passengers who paid a fare of five cents a mile for the privilege of having their teeth jarred loose. It wouldn't have surprised me if Maelzel had expected Jacques and me to walk all the way to Richmond, to save the cost of the stage. Instead, he did something wholly unexpected: He bought a covered wagonette and two horses to haul it. At first I was astonished, but I should have known Maelzel wouldn't do something so extravagant without a reason. He had heard there was a shortage of good vehicles in Richmond, and when we arrived there he sold the rig—for fifty dollars more than he'd paid for it.

I could spend an entire chapter recounting the many miseries and mishaps that befell us on that journey, which took us six days but seemed more like sixty. They would make for a pretty tedious tale, though. It can be amusing, in a perverse way, to hear about a person's trials and tribulations—after all, they've made up the bulk of my story so far—provided they're interesting ones. But there's nothing very interesting about prying a wagon out of the mud, especially after the fourth or fifth time, or being assailed by bedbugs at some shabby inn twenty miles from nowhere.

The things that befell me when we reached Richmond are a lot more compelling. There's even a beautiful young lady involved. What could be more compelling than that?

When he described Richmond as a thriving metropolis, Mr. Poe wasn't using poetic license. It was only a tenth as large as Philadelphia, but what it lacked in size it made up for in rambunctiousness. Up until then I'd led a very quiet life—I don't mean
uneventful,
of course, for in that sense it had been anything but quiet lately. I mean
quiet
as in
not noisy
. For me, entering Richmond was like being caught in a sudden, violent thunderstorm.

If you've ever been in Philadelphia on Independence Day, you know what a racket there is: bands playing and people cheering and fireworks exploding. Well, Richmond was like that every day. No one was celebrating; it was just business as usual. Pathways called “rolling roads” converged on the city from all directions, like strands of a spiderweb, and a constant parade of wagons rumbled along them, hauling hogsheads of tobacco from distant plantations to the docks at Rocketts Landing.

From the broad James River came the rhythmic splash of a dozen paddle wheels, some of them attached to flour mills and some to steamboats, and every so often a steam whistle let loose a startling shriek. From the ironworks came a constant clanging, and through the open windows of the tobacco factories floated the sound of Negro workers singing “Heaven Bell A-Ring” and “I Can't Stay Behind.” From the street in front of Bell Tavern came the shout of an auctioneer selling slaves. From Haymarket Pleasure Gardens came the squeals of delighted children and their terrified mothers riding the Flying Gigs.

In the daytime, mockingbirds chattered insanely in the trees; in the evening, the croaking of bullfrogs competed with the wails of repentant sinners at camp meetings in the fields outside of town. And underneath it all, like the harpsichord part in a Bach cantata, was the monotonous music made by the river itself as it tumbled over the rocky stretch known as The Falls.

It was a great relief to settle into the relative silence of the exhibition hall at the Virginia Museum. Our new headquarters wasn't nearly as spacious or as modern as the one we'd left behind. Twenty years earlier, the museum had been the pride of the city, with its natural science exhibits and its plaster reproductions of classical statuary like the Apollo Belvedere and the Venus de' Medici, but there just weren't enough people in Richmond to support such a grand enterprise. It now felt more like a mausoleum than a museum. To free up the main hall, the exhibits had been crammed into two small side rooms. The stuffed badgers and foxes had grown smelly and mangy, and the plaster statues were losing bits of themselves, like decaying corpses.

The main hall couldn't possibly have held all of Maelzel's automata and dioramas. He'd arranged to loan many of the pieces to an exhibition in Washington, D.C.; those crates had been dropped off in the capital city, along with one of the two remaining craftsmen. The Conflagration of Moscow, which had so entranced me with its lifelike miniatures, was no longer part of the show. It had been sold to some collector of curiosities. According to Jacques, Maelzel planned to create a whole new incarnation of the Conflagration, one that would be even more detailed and lifelike.

There was no room in the Mausoleum for an office or a workshop; naturally, Jacques and I couldn't use it as our lodgings, either. Maelzel grudgingly put us and his craftsman—a bony, humorless fellow named Mr. Moody—in a cheap boardinghouse nearby; he himself took a room at the more sumptuous Eagle Hotel.

Mr. Moody got a room to himself; I had to bunk with Jacques. I wasn't about to share a bed with him; he was still having his violent nightmares and might well strangle me. I made a pile of blankets in one corner of the room and slept on that. It wasn't comfortable, but then I don't think I would been comfortable on even the most plush featherbed, for I was still strapped into that infernal back brace most of the day and all of the night.

One of the few amenities in our room was an ancient looking glass in a scarred wooden frame. Some of the mirror's tin and quicksilver backing had flaked away, so my reflection looked pitted and decayed, like those plaster statues in the Mausoleum. But when I examined my profile in the glass, my back definitely looked straighter than it had been before the brace; I was determined to endure it until my stoop was gone altogether.

Naturally, when I walked from the boardinghouse to the Mausoleum, clad in my torture device, I drew curious stares from passersby—the rude ones, anyway. The polite ones looked pointedly away, or else gave me a sympathetic smile filled with pity. I wasn't bothered by any of it; I had been stared at and pitied for most of my life. Besides, there was a real advantage to being seen in the back brace; no one would ever imagine that such a sad case was capable of operating the Turk.

It was, in fact, getting more difficult and painful to fold myself up inside that cabinet. It wasn't due only to my straightening spine; I was bigger than I had been six months before—not a lot, but enough to make a difference. I had put on a good ten pounds and grown an inch or more in height. My wrists had begun to protrude from my jacket sleeves, and my ankles showed below my trouser cuffs.

I had no other clothing, only the stuff on my back. Aside from the Carcel lamp and my father's notebook, it was all that remained to me of my former life. Purchased by my father before his financial ruin, the items were well made and had held up admirably, considering all I had been through. I kept them as clean as I could; every week or so, I washed my linen and my trousers and brushed the dust out of my jacket. Still, it was clear that, sooner rather than later, I'd have to spend some of my hard-won wages on a new outfit.

Though I was perhaps in better health than I'd been in my life, I was still as weak as apple water. Once we had the Turk unpacked and reanimated, I tried to lend a hand with the other exhibits, but was more hindrance than help. Finally Maelzel drew me aside and thrust a sheaf of handbills at me. “Here. Normally, I hire some local lad to stick these up, but I am already paying you, so you may as well make yourself useful.”