The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [42]
Orphan walked in a daze through this gallery of unfortunates. Everywhere he looked in that wide, open space some man or woman stood or sat or – in one instance – floated (the Mermaid, a woman floating inside a large water-tank, whose lower body was made to look like the tail of a fish), some unfortunate soul was displaying an affliction for the amusement and elucidation of the paying public. On and on it went: in a side room he saw a man with no legs and a man with no arms ride a bicycle together; in another, a bearded lady shared a rolled-up cigarette and a cup of tea (apparently on her break) with a woman who had three breasts (and drew an unwanted crowd of male admirers even as she sat there).
Where was Maskelyne?
As he passed a man with bricks on his head – the bricks were being pounded into rubble by a second man with the use of a great sledgehammer – a small figure bounded up to him and grabbed him by the arm.
"Are you Orphan?" this startling person asked.
Recovering from his momentary surprised, Orphan nodded, then said, "You must be Theo."
The man who had stopped him was short of stature, and dressed in short, loose-fitting trousers and an open vest that exposed his hairy chest. His arms were equally hairy, as were his legs. His face was dark and deeply grooved, covered in a straggly beard all over that looked like wild-growing weeds. Deep, sorrowful eyes looked up at Orphan from that extraordinary face.
"You can call me Jo Jo," he said. Then he shook his head, twice, as if shaking invisible water from it, and said, "Come with me."
"Where?" Orphan said. He felt a sudden, desperate desire to leave the Hall. Its damp, dark interior, filled with the smells of human sweat and the manure of its trapped animals and the relentless gaze of the massed crowds, left him with a mixture of feelings, a sanctimonious (if heart-felt) pity vying with a cerebral excitement (for he, too, like the rest of the crowd, was thrilled by the grotesques). I am no different to anyone here, he thought. And – It's why this place is so successful.
"Come with me," Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy said again, and tugged on Orphan's sleeve. "There is someone what wants to meet you."
He walked off. Orphan, after a short hesitation, followed. I left my will at the door, he thought. This place is like a prison; if it's a museum, it is one that houses only human misery.
But it was not quite true. For, as he followed Jo Jo out of the central hall and through a long, narrow corridor, he began to notice an exhibition of curious devices lining their path. The corridor branched into small, alcove-like rooms, dimly lit like the rest of the Hall, and there were fewer and fewer people venturing this way; for here there were no animals and no human curiosities, but only machines.
In a room to the left of him he saw a mechanical menagerie, birds in the plumage of gold and silver leaves, who moved in slow jerks and called in rusted voices. They sat on the branches of a machine made to look like a tree, its chest cut open to display a series of cogs and wheels. Steam rose out of small vents in the branches, and the birds twittered and fluttered their wings each time there was a belch of steam, which came about every ten seconds.
In another room he saw several people gathered around a naked female torso that stood on top of a dais, as still as a statue, until, as to the beat of an unseen clock, she jerked her hands and turned in a circle, then subsided again into mechanical slumber.
"It's a very sad thing," Jo Jo commented while they walked. "These machines were once the apex of scientific achievement. Even five, ten years ago, I'm told, people flocked in their thousands to see them and marvel." He had the same wild-frontier accent as Tom, Orphan thought. "But now – look at them. Lost, lonely, discarded like used toys. If it wasn't for Mr. Maskelyne taking pity on them they would have soon found themselves on the rubbish heap – or worse."
That last was said