AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You’ll get your just deserts one day, you harridan,” Ceecee promised.
Minnie wrapped her arms around Bess and buried her face in the folds of the dwarf woman’s bodice.
“Don’t cling so hard, chick,” said Bess. “I’m going nowhere.”
The so-called half man-half woman spat and stalked away.
“Is that the Little Beauty who predicted our arrival?” I whispered to Miss Lightfoot. “Can Minnie actually see the future?”
“That’s hard to say, since she doesn’t talk much,” Miss Lightfoot answered softly. “However, some of the words that come out of her mouth, well, honey dumpling, it does give one pause.”
I grabbed Apollo before he slipped off. He submitted reluctantly as I combed his face where he had two to six inches of silky fair locks.
“You should tie it back from your eyes or you’ll bump into stuff, like Mr. Ginger,” said Bertha.
“You know, I could manage a topknot,” I said, to gales of laughter from the children.
Mink entered, cla
pping his hands, and the laughter halted abruptly. “Take your places, we’ve got an audience outside.” He had dressed in his tights and evening coat once more, his top hat on his head. “Stop primping that boy,” he snapped at me. “He’s supposed to look like a wild animal.”
“I should go change,” I said. I wasn’t ready for the show myself.
“Don’t bother,” said Mink. “Your job doesn’t require fancy clothes.”
“What is my job?” I asked. I had hoped Dr. Mink would take advantage of my knife-throwing after all.
“In there,” Mink said, and gestured toward the first section of tent. “Since you’re keen to look after things, you can keep the yokels’ hands off my exhibits. And don’t move from your post until we pack ’em up again.”
I stifled my disappointment and pushed through the curtain.
On a table made of planks sat three big jars; something floated in the murky liquid within each. Next to the table was the crate the jars had been packed in, and on the other side of that the long box from Mink’s wagon had been set up on trestles like a coffin in a parlor, the lid propped upright against it. There appeared to be faded designs on the lid in blue and red and yellow. Well, let’s have a look at the lady in the box, I said to myself.
I expected to find a doll, or a gaff made of papier-mâché, but inside the box lay a figure wrapped in crumbling bandages, its wrists crossed at the groin. A clawlike hand with yellow nails poked through the linens. Someone had partially removed the wrappings to reveal a brown leather face with slits for eyes and a sunken nose. The tips of a few dark teeth protruded from under tight, shrunken lips.
An Egyptian mummy?
It had to be a fake.
But the cloth was old and yellow, and a smell rose from the object like the sands of time. I felt hot sun beat down on my back, and I reeled. The music of pipes played in the distance.
17
IT MUST BE THE HEAT, I THOUGHT as I sat down carefully on the crate and wiped my brow with the back of my hand. What a fool I was. “My apologies, madam,” I said to the mummy. “The sight of your beauty quite overcame me.”
I strained my eyes to read the faded copperplate writing on a yellowed card pasted inside the box near the feet of the mummy: UNKNOWN FEMALE, SECOND INTERMEDIATE PERIOD, EGYPT. I examined her face and tried to imagine what she had looked like when alive. “You do have lovely, high cheekbones, but I’m sure you were not so tanned.” I smiled at my own joke.
How odd to see an Egyptian mummy in a tent in Iowa. A peculiar little shiver danced up my throat like fluttering wings, and my hand went to the ring, which formed a lump beneath my undershirt. No odder than to be given an Egyptian ring by a Siamese twin in Maryland. I frowned. I had the strange sensation of almost understanding something. I shrugged it off. The universe held many a fantastic and meaningless coincidence. I untied my shirtsleeves from around my waist and shook the garment out. Heat or not, if an audience was on the way, I could at least not greet them in my undershirt.
The hubbub of the crowd outside quieted as Mink launched into his pitch, inviting all to the “attractive, instructive, and elevating exhibition” inside the tent. This time he extolled the marvels of the children as well as the adults—all of them “alive, on the inside.”
“Frightened by a bear while carrying her child, a mother gave birth to a baby more ursine than human,” Mink said to describe Bertha. Willie, according to Mink, descended from natives who had mated with leopards to celebrate their god. I didn’t think Mr. Northstar would be amused. Mink called Little Beauty an amazing Oriental creature. He assured the audience that as she grew, she would develop incredible mind-reading skills because of the exceedingly large size of her brain. I chuckled. What balderdash.
I examined the jars set up on planks across trestles to my right. They were of the type used by doctors to preserve specimens, and when I saw the contents, I understood why. Within each floated a baby—waxy, pale, and distorted like a nightmare doll.
In the first jar was something labeled a mermaid—the lower two limbs were melded into one and had a single foot that faced backward like a flipper. The second jar contained what one could argue were two babies, except they had nothing from the waist down but each other. They were joined at one pelvis, with a head on either end instead of legs. The label called this a playing-card freak. I found the final baby the most disturbing, however. It had merely a dent between the shoulders where the head should have been; instead one could see the beginnings of a face peer out from its chest.
They were fine examples of lusus naturae, nature’s mistakes, and I understood why people would be fascinated, but they made me feel squeamish nevertheless. I know many would argue otherwise, but it seemed sad and disrespectful to display dead children, even if those children had never had one breath of life in them.
