Alice Hoffman - The Museum of Extraordinary Things

Coralie’s father now approached, concerned for their plan. “Have you been found out?”

She shook her head. When she tried to speak, no words were heard, only a croak, as if she had lost her voice in the river. Her face smarted with the cold. The silence of the girl in the blue coat had affected her, chilled her to the core.

The Professor took her arm, demanding to know what had caused her such distress. “This is not a game.” He saw her silence as disobedience. “You’ll tell me directly, or you’ll regret it.”

Coralie’s pale face flushed. “I found a body in the river.” Her voice sounded strangely flat. “I left her in the woods. She drowned.”

Coralie expected her father to berate her, for the dead were not their concern any more than the living were. She presumed he would contend that a corpse in the grass was no different than a child offered for a good price. And yet a strange look began to play upon the Professor’s face, his interest piqued. He asked Coralie to lead them to the place where she’d left the body. The liveryman took them along the road by carriage. Coralie continued to shiver. “The road ends nearby,” she warned. “It’s best we avoid this situation and let the authorities find her.” Once, at the funeral of a living wonder, an old man with warts like a bullfrog’s who had died in his own bed of old age, Maureen had cautioned her that if she should look upon a dead man twice, she would carry him forever. They’d hurried away from the funeral home, but Maureen’s warning had stayed with her. “We should turn back,” Coralie recommended now.

“We’ll go when I say,” her father told her. “Have faith in me.”

At the road’s end, the liveryman tied his horse to the branch of a chestnut tree and they continued on by foot. A few birds sang in the dark, but the quiet was so deep that each branch breaking under the men’s boots echoed as if a rifle had been shot. A thicker mist began to rise off the water, turning the distant shore silver. The air was warmer than the cold, hard ground. The trees were pewter, the ferns black as coal. Confused, Coralie led them in the wrong direction, and then had to backtrack. The Professor grumbled, annoyed to realize she’d taken them in a circle. But Coralie wondered anew whether it might be best if they failed to reach their destination. Possibly she had been wrong and had mistaken exhaustion for death. There might well be nothing for her father to see. Surely it was within the realm of reason to think that the girl had slept for a while in the tall grass after Coralie had run off, then had awoken refreshed. She may have smoothed down her hair, buttoned her blue coat, and arisen from the meadow to walk barefoot through the woods. You will never believe my dream, she may have told her parents, waiting at the door, relieved beyond words by her return. I dreamed I drowned and a girl who was half fish discovered me and brought me to the shore, intent on rescuing me so that I might live and walk on land like any other young woman and be your daughter once again.

Their journey continued blindly, for it now seemed apparent that Coralie couldn’t find her way. How mortified she would be if she discovered that she’d dreamed the encounter and they found nothing more than a great blue fish in the grass. But then the liveryman called out. “I see something in the hollow.”

They followed him now, the Professor rushing through the bushes, Coralie trailing behind, for she not only dreaded what they would find, she feared the reason her father had insisted they come here. Perhaps the time had come for her to defy him. If only she could find the strength to hurl herself into her own destiny, running there head-on, resolved to find her freedom. She gazed at leaves, imagining Egypt and Paris and all the wonders of the world that awaited her.

“There she is!” the liveryman shouted.

A sheaf of blue in the dark ferns and brambles.

When they came upon the body, Coralie felt something sharp run through her. She knew Maureen was right. She would indeed carry the dead with her. Coralie had the urge to turn away, but she could not. She had already seen what was before them.

The Professor shrugged off his black overcoat and threw it over the young woman. “Take her back to the wagon,” he told the liveryman. “Our treasure.”

“This isn’t what I do,” the liveryman replied, bristling. “I’ve been to jail for too many years. Now that I’m a free man, I’m not about to go back.”

“You’ll do it, or you’ll find yourself in jail for worse offenses,” the Professor told him. When he saw the grim expression on the liveryman’s face, the Professor tried another tactic. “There’s double what I usually pay in it. That should make the deed easier for you to complete.”

Coralie now noticed that the drowned girl’s head rested on weeds that had been arranged to form a pillow; her hands were crossed one upon the other on her chest. Coralie had not left the young woman in this tender position, as if waiting for the world to come. She gazed into the woods to try to spy whoever might have tended to the drowned girl, but she saw nothing but locust trees and reeds that stood nearly ten feet tall along the bank. The liveryman lifted the body over his shoulder. As he did so, the girl’s clutched hands were jostled, and what appeared to be two black stones fell from her grasp. Coralie bent to retrieve them. Once in her hands she realized these weren’t stones at all but buttons, cold as water, made of black glass.

They went back the way they had come, only now rays of sunlight glinted through the leaves and the waking songbirds trilled. They tramped along for a time, wordless, until they came upon the carriage. The Professor embraced Coralie in a rare show of affection. “You found the Hudson Mystery,” he informed her.

“Father.” Coralie paled. “How is that possible? She’s only a woman.”

“She’s that now. But when I’m finished with her, she’ll be far more.”

Coralie thought of the baby’s skeleton she’d once found upon his desk and the surgery tools set out on the white table. She thought, too, of the specimens in the glass bottles, creatures not made by God but sewn and hammered together.

“We have no choice but to create what we need,” her father assured her when he spied her worried expression. “There was a mermaid in the Hudson River who died in the cold currents, the Mystery that has haunted New York. It is our duty to preserve her so that she might remain intact for all eternity.”

The liveryman had carried the body up to the carriage; he stored the drowned girl beneath the bench. Water pooled on the floor, and there was a wet, green odor that was impossible to ignore. When she took her seat, Coralie did not look at her father but instead gazed out the window as he came to sit beside her. The horse began its easy pace through the woods.

“We have our miracle,” the Professor said, satisfied.

An outrage arose within Coralie, a distaste for her father’s business so strong it felt like a flicker of hatred. She would never again listen to his words as if they were gospel. No matter what he intended to do in the future or what deeds he had committed in the past, Coralie was certain that in good time every secret would be shared. Every miracle would be called into question.

IPLANNED to sell the watch I’d stolen as a boy to pay for Moses Levy’s funeral, but, as if it knew of my intent, it broke that very day. I wound the crown, and still it would not tell time. And so I kept it and instead sold the camera I had learned my craft upon, an American Optical. Moses had left me several other cameras, including his own ancient large-format wooden bellows camera whose images were developed as eighteen-by-twenty-four glass dry plates, and a Leica held together with tape that had an exquisite Petzval lens. From then on, I used these as my own. Moses’s favorite camera was the old battered one, oversized and heavy to carry around town. Someone else might have thought the camera I sold was the best of the bunch, but it wasn’t. A camera has its own eye, my mentor had told me. He insisted his could see the truth even when he’d begun to grow blind. I hoped it would do the same for me, for I was blind to much in this world.