The Game - Laurie R. King [105]
When I returned the pennyfarthing boy to his place, I was surprised to feel dust on my fingers, although the air smelt faintly of machine oil. The room was maintained, but not tidied.
My eyes had adjusted sufficiently to trust myself not to bump into something, so I pressed on into the room. Scattered across the floor, looking as if they had been unloaded there rather than arranged, were display cases, some of which contained larger machines such as those in fun fairs near the sea. As I threaded my way across the room I saw at least six fortune-tellers, two of them old gipsy women, the others turbanned swamis, all set to different coinages. In two machines, the customer’s coin seemed to produce nothing more thrilling than a circuit of a train through a painted landscape, with a duck-laced pond here, a mountain tunnel there. No doubt the whistle blew several times during the circuit.
Behind the smaller display cases rose four enormous constructions of mahogany and plate glass, their contents more diorama than mechanism. At first the figures within appeared to be dolls about six inches in height, but on closer examination, underneath their costumes they proved to be specimens of taxidermy art. Most of the creatures were furry, blunt-faced rodents with no tails to speak of and short ears—a variety of guinea pig, perhaps. One case held perhaps thirty of the things, posed on their hind legs and dressed for a formal ball, half of them in white tie, the others wearing silk or velvet, with diamonds on their hairy throats and diminutive champagne glasses clasped in their upraised paws. The second case represented, I assumed, a box at the Ascot races: A dozen of the creatures clutched tiny binoculars and wore elaborate spring hats. The third was a night-club, with dancers on a stage, their furry bodies graced with strips of costume and feathers perkily jutting from their heads. The fourth case held eight infant piglets, of the pale domesticated kind, gathered in a Victorian conservatory around a laden tea table; something about their attitudes made it seem a cruel parody of society at the time—English society, that is.
As elaborate pieces of humour, they were most emphatically not to my taste. I thought it more than a little perverse, in fact, to raise a hundred small creatures just for the purpose of being transformed into facsimile human beings.
Along the back wall of the room a trace of gravel on the floor gave further evidence of the paucity of attentive servants in this place. (And as for their master, I thought, where was the maharaja, anyway? I’d been well after nine o’clock getting here, thanks to the unexpected distance between my rooms and this place.) Farther along, nearly in the corner, I came across the collection’s more, well, esoteric contraptions. The first startled me by appearing to be a man; this, on closer examination, proved to be what he was, a life-sized waxwork Englishman in the uniform of the Crimean War, complete with musket. I supposed he fired it when animated. He had been placed, possibly by accident, as if to stand guard over a cluster of glass-cased boxes, although these had neither gipsies nor swamis, and one glance made me glad I did not have the requisite tokens for putting them in motion. The women had skin that was uniformly pink and pearly, the men ranged from white to a darker shade of English pink, and all of them were comprehensively nude. I shook my head and turned to retrace my steps to the door, and nearly shrieked at the silent and unpainted figure ten feet away.
“Heavens!” I said, my heart pounding. “Your Highness, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.”
“My grandfather’s collection. And I do wish you’d call me Jimmy.”
“They’re . . . extraordinary.